Expertise, Text Coherence, and Constraint Satisfaction: Effects on Harmony and Settling Rate
Abstract
This paper reports four experiments showing that 27 experts' mental representations had significantly higher harmony and faster settling rates than 652 novices when activation was spread through the representations in a simulation of thinking; that when coherent texts were read by novices, they produced mental representations with significantly higher harmony and faster settling rates than less coherent texts; and that novices whose representations matched the experts' mental representations had significantly higher harmony and faster settling rates. The results were found for declarative experts in history and procedural experts in literary interpretation, for Dutch and American experts, for novice groups including U.S. Air Force recruits and U.S. and Dutch undergraduates, and for both history texts and literary texts. These results were consistent with our hypothesis that the quality of a person's prior knowledge determines the harmony and settling rates of their representations and that these can be measured by simulating the spread of activation through the person's mental representation of a subject matter domain. Harmony may also be used as a metacognitive signal.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 08, 1993
- Accession Number
- ADA262703
Entities
People
- Bruce K. Britton
- F. J. Eisenhart
Organizations
- University of Georgia