Expert and Novice Differences in Recognizing Similar Situations Pat-Anthony Federico: Navy Personnel Research and Development Center

Abstract

To test hypotheses regarding expert and novice differences in recognizing similar scenarios, 28 senior naval officers and 52 junior naval officers (1) classified tactical situations each of which appeared on a note card, (2) labeled every created cluster to convey a category description, and (3) signified their criteria for sorting scenarios. Principal-components and discriminant analyses, and associated statistics, established that when categorizing situations (1) experts are more context-dependent than novices, (2) experts and novices do not differ significantly in the number of schemas and scenarios per schema formed as well as in the access avenues ascribed for these schemas, (3) experts do not process scenarios at significantly deeper levels of analysis than novices, and (4) experts do not assign significantly more importance to conceptual aspects or deep structures than novices, and less importance to perceptual properties or surface features than novices.

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