心理表征是什么玩意（1）
读了《刻意练习》一书，其中有一章叫做心理表征，不明白是什么玩意。想必是翻译过程除了问题，于是找到原书读了一番。
“Mental representations aren’t just for chess masters; we all use them constantly. A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. A simple example is a visual image. Mention the Mona Lisa, for instance, and many people will immediately “see” an image of the painting in their minds; that image is their mental representation of the Mona Lisa. Some people’s representations are more detailed and accurate than others, and they can report, for example, details about the background, about where Mona Lisa is sitting, and about her hairstyle and her eyebrows.
心理表征就是关于研究对象你大脑中瞬间浮现的所有东西。比如说一听到蒙娜丽莎你脑海中出现了什么景象？
“A somewhat more complex example of a mental representation is a word—dog, for example. Suppose you’ve never heard of a dog and never seen anything like it. Perhaps you’ve grown up in some isolated place—a desert island, say—where there are no four-legged animals of any sort, only birds and fish and insects. When you’re first introduced to the concept of dog, it is all just isolated data, and the word dog doesn’t really mean much to you; it is just a label for this collection of disconnected knowledge. Dogs are furry, they have four legs, they are meat eaters, they run in packs, the little ones are called puppies, they can be trained, and so on. Gradually, however, as you spend time around dogs and start to understand them, all this information becomes integrated into one holistic concept that is represented by the word dog. Now when you hear that word, you don’t have to search your memory banks to remember all the various details about dogs; instead, all that information is immediately accessible. You have added dog not only to your vocabulary but to your set of mental representations.”
作者拿狗举了个例子，狗不是字典定义的狗，而是你听到狗时脑海中所浮现的一切。
“Even when the skill being practiced is primarily physical, a major factor is the development of the proper mental representations. Consider a competitive diver working on a new dive. Much of the practice is devoted to forming a clear mental picture of what the dive should look like at every moment and, more importantly, what it should feel like in terms of body positioning and momentum. Of course, the deliberate practice will also lead to physical changes in the body itself—in divers, the development of the legs, abdominal muscles, back, and shoulders, among other body parts—but without the mental representations necessary to produce and control the body’s movements correctly, the physical changes would be of no use.”
你的每一次锻炼都改写着你的心理印象。
“A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed. We saw this with Steve Faloon: the mental representations he had devised to remember strings of digits did nothing to improve his memory for strings of letters. Similarly, a chess player’s mental representations will give him or her no advantage over others in tests involving general visuospatial abilities, and a diver’s mental representations will be useless for basketball.”
mental representations都是领域特定的。举个例子，记数字的能力对你记单词的能力并没有啥帮助。也就是说，比如说你要学习记忆某样东西你就去记某样东西，而不是去学习笼统的记忆法。
“This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player. You don’t train to “become a doctor; you train to become a diagnostician or a pathologist or a neurosurgeon. Of course, some people do become overall memory experts or athletes in a number of sports or doctors with a general set of skills, but they do so by training in a number of different areas.”
训练的目标必须是特定的，具体的。你不能说你训练成为一个运动员，你只能说哎我要做一名XX运动员。打乒乓球的mental representations对你打羽毛球毫无用处。
“Because the details of mental representations can differ dramatically from field to field, it’s hard to offer an overarching definition that is not too vague, but in essence these representations are preexisting patterns of information—facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on—that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations. The thing all mental representations have in common is that they make it possible to process large amounts of information quickly, despite the limitations of short-term memory. Indeed, one could define a mental representation as a conceptual structure designed to sidestep the usual restrictions that short-term memory places on mental processing.”
不同领域差异太大，可以说由于已有的经验，你对你研究领域反应更快，这个克服了短期记忆的缺点。
“The best example of this that we have seen is Steve Faloon’s ability to recall as many as eighty-two digits when only seven or eight digits would have been possible if he’d had to rely on short-term memory alone. He did it by encoding the digits he was hearing, three or four at a time, into meaningful memories in his long-term memory and then associating these memories with the retrieval structure, which allowed him to remember which digit group followed which. To do all this he needed mental representations not just for the three- and four-digit groups of numbers that he was holding on to but also for the retrieval structure itself, which he visualized as a sort of two-dimensional tree with the three- and four-digit groups placed at the ends of the individual branches.”
这个记忆数字的过程就是一种mental representations，不光要对数字进行编码
“But memorizing lists of things is just the simplest example of how short-term memory comes into play in our lives. We constantly have to hold on to and process many pieces of information simultaneously: the words in a sentence whose meaning we are figuring out, the positions of the pieces on a chessboard, or the different factors we must take into account when driving a car, such as our own speed and momentum, the positions and speeds of other vehicles, the road conditions and visibility, where our foot must be to hit the accelerator or brake, how much force to apply to the pedals, how quickly to turn the steering wheel, and so on. Any relatively complicated activity requires holding more information in our heads than short-term memory allows, so we are always building mental representations of one sort or another without even being aware of it. Indeed, without mental representations we couldn’t walk (too many muscle movements to coordinate), we couldn’t talk (ditto on the muscle movements, plus no understanding of the words), we couldn’t live any sort of human life.”
没有mental representations，你连走路也不会。走路也是很复杂的情况，注意路况，协调肢体等等。
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