What factors enable people to develop and maintain expert performance across the life-span? Dr. Charness will present a framework for understanding expertise development and apply it to the domain of chess skill. He draws on analyses of skill trajectories from archival data sets of high-level performers, practice data from questionnaire studies of players in Europe and North America, experimental studies of early perceptual processes, and simulation studies using neural nets to examine age-knowledge trade-offs relevant to chess and other expert skills.

Dr. Neil Charness is currently Professor of Psychology in the Psychology Department at Florida State University and an Associate of the Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy at Florida State University. He received his BA from McGill University, Montreal in 1965 and his MS (1971) and PhD (1974) from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.

His research interests involve age and human factors and age and expert performance. His research is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Aging) and from a supplement to the NIA grant from NIOSH.

Dr. Charness served as Editor for the Psychology Section of the Canadian Journal on Aging/revue canadienne du vieillissement, and on the Editorial Boards of Psychology and Aging, Psychological Bulletin, and Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, and as Chairperson of the Editorial Board for Gerontechnology.

He served on the Boards of the Canadian Association of Gerontology, the Canadian Psychological Association (Chair of the Section on Adult Development on Aging), and as Program Chair for the American Psychological Association's Division 20 (Adult Development and Aging).

Dr. Charness has been elected Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association (Division 20), the Gerontological Society of America, and the American Psychological Society. He currently serves on the National Academy of Sciences Committee studying Health and Safety Issues for Older Workers.

This lecture is an installment of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Lecture Series sponsored by the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and organized by the NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee.

The Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR CC), with support from the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), convenes a series of guest lectures and symposia on selected topics in the behavioral and social sciences. These presentations by prominent behavioral and social scientists provide the NIH community with overviews of current research on topics of scientific and social interest. The lectures and symposia are approximately 50 minutes in length, with additional time for questions and discussion. All seminars are open to NIH staff and to the general public.