Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An important issue concerns the relation between expertise in highly-structured domains and ill structured domains. This study explored the information processing abilities associated with expertise in literature, an ill-structured domain. Literary experts were superior to novices in gist level recall, the extraction of interpretations and the breadth of aspects addressed of literary texts but not of a scientific text. The results indicate that expertise in literature appears to share features with expertise in highly-structured domains, including domain-specificity and an absu^ct level of representation.