Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study, we examine expert-novice differences in knowledge organization using similarity ratings. Geology novices and experts provided pairwise similarity ratings for images of typical and atypical geological specimens drawn from the Rocks-30 and Rocks-360 stimulus sets provided by Nosofsky and colleagues (2018a). The pairwise similarity ratings for each group were used to construct multidimensional space representations as well as network models. Both network and MDS analyses revealed clear taxonomic differentiation by the experts. The novice MDS dimensions were easily matched to perceptual feature ratings provided in the Rocks-30 dataset. However, some of the expert dimensions did not match either the perceptual feature ratings or expert self-reported features. These results reveal expert-novice differences in knowledge organization using a quantitative methodology, and also suggest that aspects of expert knowledge organization may be missed when using methods that depend on self-report.