Learning of nondomain facts in high- and low-knowledge domains

Research on expertise has repeatedly documented that experts learn new info rmation better than do novices, but only when the information is relevant t o the expert's domain. It was found in Experiment I that participants showe d superior learning and recall of a large quantity of new, non-domain-relev ant facts about concepts within their domain of high knowledge than about c oncepts for which they had low domain knowledge. Experiment 2 investigated whether the participants' superior recall of new facts related to concepts within their domain of high knowledge was due to the number of prior facts associated with the concept or to the prior frequency of repetition of thos e concepts. It was found that participants' recall of new facts was better for concepts with 5 prior associated facts than for concepts with a single prior association but that the number of previous repetitions of each conce pt did not affect the level of recall for the new facts.