Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Objects with varying amounts of domain knowledge read texts on two controvCTsial issues: whether the U S should participate in the Persian Gulf War and w^iether abortion should be legal. Each text contained ten arguments for each side of the issue. Subjects with the most knowledge about the topics recalled rou^ly equal numbers of arguments from either side of the issue, while subjects with less knowledge recalled more arguments for the side they agreed with. The results were replicated with a third topic, the OJ Simpson case. The results of both experiments suggest that recall bias due to attitude may be eUminated by the possession of domain knowledge. ImpUcations for instructional programs using expert models are discussed.