Table_2_The Modified Imitation Game: A Method for Measuring Interactional Expertise.docx

The study of the sociology of scientific knowledge distinguishes between contributory and interactional experts. Contributory experts have practical expertise—they can “walk the walk.” Interactional experts have internalized the tacit components of expertise—they can “talk the talk” but are not able to reliably “walk the walk.” Interactional expertise permits effective communication between contributory experts and others (e.g., laypeople), which in turn facilitates working jointly toward shared goals. Interactional expertise is attained through long-term immersion into the expert community in question. To assess interactional expertise, researchers developed the imitation game—a variant of the Turing test—to test whether a person, or a particular group, possesses interactional expertise of another. The imitation game, which has been used mainly in sociology to study the social nature of knowledge, may also be a useful tool for researchers who focus on cognitive aspects of expertise. In this paper, we introduce a modified version of the imitation game and apply it to examine interactional expertise in the context of blindness. Specifically, we examined blind and sighted individuals’ ability to imitate each other in a street-crossing scenario. In Phase I, blind and sighted individuals provided verbal reports of their thought processes associated with crossing a street—once while imitating the other group (i.e., as a pretender) and once responding genuinely (i.e., as a non-pretender). In Phase II, transcriptions of the reports were judged as either genuine or imitated responses by a different set of blind and sighted participants, who also provided the reasoning for their decisions. The judges comprised blind individuals, sighted orientation-and-mobility specialists, and sighted individuals with infrequent socialization with blind individuals. Decision data were analyzed using probit mixed models for signal-detection-theory indices. Reasoning data were analyzed using natural-language-processing (NLP) techniques. The results revealed evidence that interactional expertise (i.e., relevant tacit knowledge) can be acquired by immersion in the group that possesses and produces the expert knowledge. The modified imitation game can be a useful research tool for measuring interactional expertise within a community of practice and evaluating practitioners’ understanding of true experts.

科学知识社会学（Sociology of Scientific Knowledge）将专家划分为贡献型专家与互动型专家两类。贡献型专家具备实践专长，能够“身体力行”；互动型专家则内化了专长的隐性成分，虽可“侃侃而谈”，却无法可靠地“身体力行”。互动型专长能够促成贡献型专家与其他群体（如外行人）之间的有效沟通，进而助力双方协同推进共同目标的达成。互动型专长需通过长期沉浸于目标专家社群方可习得。为评估互动型专长，研究者开发了模仿游戏——图灵测试（Turing Test）的变体——用以检验个人或特定群体是否具备针对另一群体的互动型专长。该模仿游戏主要应用于社会学领域以研究知识的社会属性，但其也可成为聚焦专长认知维度的研究者的实用工具。本文提出了改良版的模仿游戏，并将其应用于视障场景下的互动型专长研究。具体而言，我们考察了视障与明眼个体在过街情境中相互模仿的能力。在第一阶段，视障与明眼受试者需分别以两种身份提供过街相关的思维过程口头报告：一是模仿另一群体（即伪装者身份），二是真实回应（即非伪装者身份）。在第二阶段，由另一组视障与明眼受试者对报告的真伪（即真实回应抑或模仿回应）进行判定，并同时给出判定理由。判定人员涵盖视障人士、明眼的定向与行动辅助专家，以及极少与视障群体社交的明眼人士。决策数据采用基于信号检测论指标的概率混合模型（Probit Mixed Models）进行分析，推理数据则采用自然语言处理（NLP）技术开展分析。研究结果表明，互动型专长（即相关隐性知识）可通过沉浸于拥有并产出专业知识的社群而习得。改良版模仿游戏可作为实用研究工具，用于测量实践社群内的互动型专长，并评估从业者对真正专家的理解程度。