AFTER THE LEARNING IS OVER - FACTORS CONTROLLING THE SELECTIVE APPLICATION OF GENERAL AND PARTICULAR KNOWLEDGE

People often have general knowledge about a category as well as knowin g some of its members. These forms of knowledge and how they are coord inated in dealing with new stimuli were investigated. Ss were trained twice on the same items, coding them as whole units on some trials and analyzing their typical features on others. In generalization tests, Ss used these forms of knowledge selectively, depending on the type of judgment required but also depending on the perceptual organization o f the display, the sequence of activities performed in test, and the d emands of concomitant tasks. These test factors caused the Ss to organ ize a new stimulus as a unit or as a collection of features; in turn, this organization of the stimulus cued whichever representations of pr ior experience were similar. It was concluded that selective utilizati on of general and specific knowledge is controlled by multiple task fa ctors that determine the initial processing of a stimulus.