Human Use of World Knowledge
Abstract
Three experiments are presented to examine how humans use world knowledge in complex situations and to see if people can acquire new knowledge in a formal way (i.e., symbolic and linguistic rather than experience-based knowledge) without a strong semantic understanding of the area of discourse. These experiments limit the interactions between the new area of discourse and the subject's existing body of world knowledge by translating each of the content words of the new area into a nonsense word, and presenting the subject with a mixture of the original English description and the substituted nonsense words. The experiments utilized areas of discourse of different size and complexity, and with different experimental environments desired to elicit both the conclusions being drawn and the evidence upon which they were based.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 1974
- Accession Number
- AD0778006
Entities
People
- Robert M. Balzer
Organizations
- University of Southern California