Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The representation of the distribution of knowledge guidesinformation gathering, help seeking, and communication. Theresearch aimed to explore adults’ and 4-year-olds’representation of the distribution of common (conventionaland procedural) knowledge and expert knowledge associatedwith five occupations in their community. In addition, weexamined estimates of occupation-related everyday (non-expert) knowledge. Both groups estimated that commonknowledge is more widely held than expert knowledge, witheveryday knowledge in between. For adults, but not children,the distribution of expert knowledge was correlated withestimates of the proportion of people in each occupation.