Relative Importance of Domain Knowledge and Overall Aptitude on Acquisition of Domain-Related Information

Abstract

Two experiments investigated whether domain-specific expertise could compensate for low overall aptitude on certain domain-related cognitive processing tasks. It was hypothesized that the performance of low-aptitude individuals on a task requiring them to acquire new information in a domain would be a function of domain expertise rather than overall aptitude level. In Experiment 1, two low-aptitude groups, one with high domain knowledge and one with low domain knowledge, were presented with a baseball passage. On both recall and recognition tests, performance was a function of level of expertise in the domain. In Experiment 2, both level of baseball knowledge and overall aptitude were varied in a factorial design. Again, performance was a function of baseball knowledge rather than aptitude level. Low-aptitude/high-knowledge participants recalled more information than high-aptitude/low-knowledge participants. In addition, the performance of the low-aptitude/high-knowledge group was similar to the high-aptitude/high-knowledge group with respect to the importance of information recalled and the number of goal relevant inferences. These findings are discussed in the context of an information deficit versus a processing deficit.