University of Graz, Universitätsplatz 2, 8010, Graz, Austria.
Sci Rep. 2023 Aug 2;13(1):12500. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-39309-w.
In 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.
与传统的专业领域（如国际象棋和音乐）相比，人们对更广泛、更注重教育的领域（如数学）的认知机制知之甚少。这在数学专家的知识在记忆中的特定领域信息处理以及特定领域和一般领域的创造力中的作用方面尤其如此。在本工作中，我们将 115 名数学专家与 109 名性别、年龄和教育程度相匹配的新手进行了比较，他们在（a）新开发的需要对结构化和非结构化信息进行编码和回忆的数学记忆任务中的表现，以及（b）基于数学或基于一般领域的创造力的任务中的表现。与其他专业领域一致，当以结构化和有意义的方式呈现复杂的特定领域材料时，数学专家（与新手相比）表现出更好的短期记忆能力。此外，专家在数学创造力方面优于新手，但在一般领域的创造力方面与新手没有差异。这两条研究结果都表明了专家知识库在处理特定领域材料方面的重要性，并为数学专业知识的特点提供了新的见解。
