When the researchers interviewed the surgeons after the operations about their thought processes during the surgery, they found that the main way the surgeons detected problems was by noticing that something about the surgery didn’t match the way they had visualized the surgery in their preoperative plan. Once they noticed the mismatch, they came up with a list of alternative approaches and decided which was most likely to work. This points to something important about how these experienced surgeons perform: over time they have developed effective mental representations that they use in
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