How Goals Affect the Organization and Use of Domain Knowledge

Overview

Journal Mem Cognit

Specialty Psychology

Date 2007 Oct 4

PMID 17910170

Citations 1

Authors

Benjamin D Jee

Jennifer Wiley

Affiliations

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Abstract

Expert specialists organize their knowledge around information related to their goals. In the experiments presented here, the relation between goal use and knowledge organization was investigated by manipulating participants' goals as they learned about a novel domain. Experiment 1 showed that goal use produces biases toward goal-related information in categorization and induction. Experiment 2 revealed that the bias toward goal relatedness is not absolute; participants use their knowledge flexibly, depending on the context of induction. Experiment 3 showed that using information in the absence of a meaningful goal does not produce significant goal-related biases. Altogether, the effects of goal use are evident across a number of tasks and may depend on goal meaningfulness and the coherence it provides to goal-related knowledge structures.

Citing Articles

Observation versus classification in supervised category learning.

Levering K, Kurtz K Mem Cognit. 2014; 43(2):266-82.

PMID: 25190494 DOI: 10.3758/s13421-014-0458-2.

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