Author:
Meier Michaela A.,Gross Franz,Vogel Stephan E.,Grabner Roland H.
Abstract
AbstractIn contrast to traditional expertise domains like chess and music, very little is known about the cognitive mechanisms in broader, more education-oriented domains like mathematics. This is particularly true for the role of mathematical experts’ knowledge for domain-specific information processing in memory as well as for domain-specific and domain-general creativity. In the present work, we compared 115 experts in mathematics with 109 gender, age, and educational level matched novices in their performance in (a) a newly developed mathematical memory task requiring encoding and recall of structured and unstructured information and (b) tasks drawing either on mathematical or on domain-general creativity. Consistent with other expertise domains, experts in mathematics (compared to novices) showed superior short-term memory capacity for complex domain-specific material when presented in a structured, meaningful way. Further, experts exhibited higher mathematical creativity than novices, but did not differ from them in their domain-general creativity. Both lines of findings demonstrate the importance of experts’ knowledge base in processing domain-specific material and provide new insights into the characteristics of mathematical expertise.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
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