CONCEPT
Pattern Templates
Goldberg's term for the accumulated cognitive structures through which the expert mind recognizes the deep structure of novel situations before their surface features have been fully analyzed — the neurological substrate of expertise.
A pattern template is the cognitive deposit left behind by effortful engagement with a class of problems. After a chess grandmaster has analyzed thousands of board positions, her brain has deposited pattern templates that allow her to recognize structural features — an imbalance, a tactical motif, a developing threat — in a single glance, without the conscious analysis the novice must perform. The template is not a memorized solution. It is a recognition structure that allows the new situation to be rapidly assimilated to the class of previously encountered structurally similar situations, freeing the brain's expensive analytical resources for whatever is genuinely novel about this particular instance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Goldberg's research on expertise, developed in dialogue with studies of chess masters, elite physicians, and expert performers across domains, converges on a single neurological claim: expertise consists not primarily in the memorization of facts or the learning of procedures but in the deposition of pattern templates that