Alexander Burgoyne plays drums with The Blue Effect in Traverse City, Michigan
Alexander P. Burgoyne was awarded the Rasmussen Fellowship upon enrolling in the doctoral program at MSU. In 2018, Alex was awarded the Future Academic Scholars in Teaching Fellowship. He also earned a Research Scholars Award from the College of Social Sciences, a Research Enhancement Award from the Department of Psychology, and won a Thompson Endowment Fellowship Award.

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Hats I've worn lately:
Laboratory Manager - Expertise Lab
Supervisor: D. Zach Hambrick, PhD

Webmaster - The Journal of Expertise
www.journalofexpertise.org

Teaching Assistant - Sensation and Perception (W)
Professor: Mark Becker, Ph.D.
What I'm reading:
The Science of Expertise: Behavioral, Neural, and Genetic Approaches to Complex Skill
Edited by Hambrick, Campitelli, & Macnamara

Neural Implementations of Expertise
Edited by Bilalić, Langner, Campitelli, Turella, & Grodd
What I'm listening to:
Conversations
Stanton Moore

Root Down
Jimmy Smith

Alexander P. Burgoyne

Hi, I'm Alex. I'm fascinated by expertise and the cognitive processes underlying complex skill acquisition. My research interests include assessing the roles of ability, training, and personality in the attainment of exceptional performance; the moderating role of domain characteristics on predictors of achievement; intelligence, working memory, and placekeeping ability; predictors of perseverance and attrition; failures in proofreading and the self-generation effect more generally; the contribution of attention, instruction, and self-awareness to the efficacy of practice; and creativity & improvisation.

Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Doctoral Program
Michigan State University
Ongoing Projects:

Testing the Circumvention of Limits Hypothesis
Does the relationship between cognitive ability and complex skill acquisition decrease as a function of domain-relevant experience? To what extent can selective attrition and reliance on memory-based skill account for decreasing ability-performance correlations? This multi-domain project seeks to test the circumvention of limits hypothesis in chess, music, sports, and other domains.

Acquiring Skill in Music: An Individual Differences Approach
What enables some people to defy the typical trajectory of skill acquisition and attain expert levels of performance well before their peers? In this project I assess the relative contribution of individual differences to the acquisition of musical skill in novice pianists.

Predictors of Multitasking Performance
With technology woven into the fabric of everyday experience, there is an increasing demand for multitaskers, especially in the workplace. This experiment tracks the effect of specialized training on predictors of multitasking proficiency.

Malleability of Placekeeping Ability
We're testing the malleability of placekeeping ability, a ubiquitous cognitive control construct involved in everything from medical procedures and military operations to making your morning cup of coffee.

Testing the Strategy Use Hypothesis
What accounts for the predictive validity of placekeeping ability? In this experiment we're experimentally manipulating strategy use to determine whether individual differences in devising and implementing successful strategies mediate relationships between complex task performance.

A Decade of Golf
We're compiling data on the past decade of elite golfers to estimate changes in the relative contribution of power and precision over time.
Publications

Hambrick, Burgoyne, & Oswald (in press)

The Role of Interests in the Development of Expertise: A Multifactorial Perspective
Vocational Interests in the Workplace: Rethinking Behavior at Work

Burgoyne et al. (in press)

The Impact of Domain-Specific Experience on Chess Skill: Re-Analysis of a Key Study
American Journal of Psychology

Hambrick, Altmann, & Burgoyne (in press)

A Knowledge-Activation Approach to Testing the Circumvention-of-Limits Hypothesis
American Journal of Psychology

Hambrick, Burgoyne, & Oswald (in press)

Domain-General Models of Expertise: The Role of Cognitive Ability
Oxford Handbook of Expertise: Research and Application

Burgoyne, Hambrick, & Altmann (under review)

What Accounts for Individual Differences in Placekeeping Ability? A Test of the Strategy Use Hypothesis

Burgoyne, Hambrick, & Altmann (under review)

Placekeeping Ability as a Component of Fluid Intelligence



Burgoyne et al. (under review)

Altering Mindsets with a Brief Online Intervention

Mix et al. (2018)

The Latent Structure of Spatial Skill: A Test of the 2 x 2 Typology
Cognition

Sisk & Burgoyne et al. (2018)

To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses
Psychological Science

Hambrick & Burgoyne et al. (2018)

Toward a Multifactorial Model of Expertise: Beyond Born Versus Made
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Macnamara et al. (2018)

The Deliberate Practice View: An Evaluation of Definitions, Claims, and Empirical Evidence
The Science of Expertise

Hambrick & Burgoyne et al. (2018)

Working Memory, Thinking, and Expertise
International Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning

Burgoyne et al. (2016)

The Relationship between Cognitive Ability and Chess Skill: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis
Intelligence

Sala & Burgoyne et al. (2017)

Checking the “Academic Selection” Argument. Chess Players Outperform Non-Chess Players in Cognitive Skills Related to Intelligence: A Meta-Analysis
Intelligence

Popular Writing
Programs

These programs were developed in E-Studio by Alexander P. Burgoyne and are compatible with E-Prime.

Email burgoyn4@msu.edu for password


Choose-A-Move Chess Test

Choose-A-Move Shortened Chess Test

Chess Knowledge Test

Visual Arrays (Luck & Vogel, 1997)

Pattern Comparison

Reading Comprehension

Typing Speed