Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many industry professionals are poorly calibrated, overestimatingtheir ability to make accurate forecasts. Previous research hasdemonstrated that an individual’s calibration in a specific domaincan be improved through calibration training in that domain;however devising a training program for each specific domainwithin a field is laborious. A more efficient method would be ifindividuals from different disciplines could undertake the samegeneral training and transfer the skills learnt to their respective,specific domains. This study investigated whether calibrationtraining in a general domain was transferable to the specificdomain of petroleum engineering. The results showed that, whilstthe feedback training was effective within the general domain,there was only limited transfer to the specific domain. This isargued to be due to recognition failure, where the participantsfailed to recognise that the skill learnt through training in thegeneral domain could be transferred to the specific domain.