Peak human performance—whether of Olympic athletes, Nobel prize winners, or you cooking the best dish you’ve ever made—depends on skill. Skill is at the heart of what it means to excel. Yet, the fixity of skilled behavior can sometimes make it seem a lower-level activity, more akin to the movements of an invertebrate or a machine. Peak performance in elite athletes is often described, for example, as “automatic” by those athletes: “The most frequent response from participants (eight athletes and one coach) when describing the execution of a peak performance was the automatic execution of performance” (Anderson et al. 2014). While the automaticity of skilled behavior is widely acknowledged, some worry that too much automaticity in skill would challenge its ability to exhibit human excellence. And so two camps have developed: those who focus on the automaticity of skilled behavior, the “habitualists,” and those who focus on the higher-level cognition behind peak performance, the “intellectualists.” We take a different tack. We argue that skilled behavior weaves together automaticity and higher-level cognition, which we call “pluralism.” That is, we argue that automaticity and higher-level cognition are both normal features of skilled behavior that benefit skilled behavior. This view is hinted at in other quotes about automaticity in skill—while expert gamers describe themselves as “playing with” automaticity (Taylor and Elam 2018), expert musicians are said to balance automaticity with creativity through performance cues: “Performance cues allow the musician to attend to some aspects of the performance while allowing others to be executed automatically” (Chaffin and Logan 2006). We describe in this paper three ways that higher-level cognition and automaticity are woven together. The first two, level pluralism and synchronic pluralism, are described in other papers, albeit under different cover. We take our contribution to be both distinguishing the three forms and contributing the third, diachronic pluralism. In fact, we find that diachronic pluralism presents the strongest case against habitualism and intellectualism, especially when considered through the example of strategic automaticity. In each case of pluralism, we use research on the presence or absence of attention (e.g., in mind wandering) to explore the presence or absence of higher-level cognition in skilled behavior.

无论是奥运会运动员，诺贝尔奖获得者，还是您做过的最好菜，人类的最高绩效都取决于技巧。技能是成就卓越的核心。但是，熟练的行为的固定性有时会使它看起来像是较低水平的活动，更类似于无脊椎动物或机器的运动。精英运动员的最佳表现通常被这些运动员描述为“自动”：“参与者在描述执行最佳表现时最频繁的反应（八名运动员和一名教练）是自动执行表现”（ Anderson等人，2014年）。尽管人们普遍认可熟练的行为的自动性，但有些人担心，过多的技能自动性将挑战其表现出人类卓越能力的能力。因此，形成了两个阵营：那些关注技能行为自动性的人，即“惯常主义者”，以及那些关注最高绩效背后的更高层次认知的人，即“智能主义者”。我们采取不同的方针。我们认为熟练的行为将自动性和更高层次的认知编织在一起，我们称之为“多元主义”。也就是说，我们认为自动性和更高层次的认知都是有益于技能行为的技能行为的正常特征。这种观点在其他有关技巧自动性的报价中得到了暗示：虽然专业游戏玩家将自己描述为“玩”自动性（Taylor和Elam，2018年），但据说专业音乐家通过演奏提示在自动性和创造力之间取得平衡：“表演提示使音乐家可以参与表演的某些方面，而其他方面则可以自动执行”（Chaffin和Logan 2006）。我们在本文中描述了将高级认知和自动化编织在一起的三种方式。前两个在其他论文中也描述了级别多元性和共时多元性，尽管涵盖范围不同。我们做出的贡献既是区分这三种形式，又是贡献第三种历时性多元化。实际上，我们发现历时多元论是反对习惯主义和理智主义的最有力论据，尤其是在通过战略自动性的例子加以考虑时。在多元主义的每种情况下，我们都使用关于注意力是否存在的研究（例如，思维游荡）来探索技能行为中是否存在更高层次的认知。