Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigates how expertise influences the mental representation of dance choreography, focusing on differences between expert and novice ballet dancers. Event Segmentation Theory (EST) was used to examine chunking in a 50-step ballet sequence. Participants, classified as experts or novices based on dance experience, were tasked with segmenting choreography across repeated viewings. Results showed that experts segmented the sequence into fewer, larger chunks, and showed greater consistency and greater similarity with each other. Novices, in contrast, identified more segments and showed less agreement. These findings underscore the role of domain-specific knowledge that incorporates the structure of the domain in forming mental representations, and sets the stage for exploring how this may enable superior expert learning and memory for very long sequences of dance. Keywords: expertise; event segmentation; chunking; dance memory