Problem Representation in Experts and Novices: Part 2. Underlying Processing Me- chanisms

It has been well established that experts and novices focus on different aspects of problems, with novices focusing more on surface features rather than on deep principled features of a problem. What is less clear are the mechanisms that underlie these differences in construal of problem representation. The current study, which uses an ‘old/new’ recognition procedure, examines expert and novice representation of arithmetic equations in which the deep relational properties (i.e., principles of commutativity and associativity) were well known to both groups. Results indicate that both novices and experts encode both surface and principled features in the same serial manner, with surface features preceding principled features for both. At the same time, only for novices and not for experts, surface features compete with deep features, thus requiring additional resources to inhibit this attentional competition.