Situation assessment is crucial for making schema-driven decisions in naturalistic settings. Recognizing that some situations are similar to a specific category of scenarios underscores the classification aspect. To test hypotheses regarding expert and novice differences in recognizing similar scenarios, 28 senior naval officers and 52 junior naval officers classified tactical situations, each of which appeared on a note card, labeled every created cluster to convey a category description, and signified their criteria for sorting scenarios. Principal-components and discriminant analyses, and associated statistics, established that when categorizing situations, experts and novices used surface features and deep structures as criteria for recognizing similarity; experts are significantly more context-dependent than are novices; experts and novices do not differ significantly in the number of schemata and scenarios per schema formed or in the access avenues ascribed for these schemata; experts do not process scenarios at significantly deeper levels of analysis than do novices; and experts do not assign significantly more importance to conceptual aspects or less importance to perceptual properties than do novices.
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