Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper reports three experiments showing that 17 experts' mental representations had significantly higher harmony and faster settling rates than 638 novices' when activation was spread through the representations in a simulation of thinliing; 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 novice groups including U.S. Air Force recruits and 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 trough the person's mental representation of a subject matter domain. Harmony may also be used as a metacognitive signal. In these studies, we investigated the quality of mental representations. To do this, first we measured each subject's mental representation for a domain, and then we