Mind the bind: Mapping expertise in semantic schemata using network science
Publication date
2026
Document type
Meeting Abstract
Author
Organisational unit
Conference
48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society ; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ; July 22–25, 2026
Publisher
California Digital Library
Series or journal
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Periodical volume
48
First page
5441
Last page
5441
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Keyword
expertise
semantic knowledge
network model
art schema
Abstract
Expertise shapes the organization of semantic knowledge, yet prior work using cognitive network science remains sparse and limited in methodological diversity. Study 1 used a free-listing task to identify the concepts constituting the visual art schema in experts and laypeople. Study 2 collected pairwise relatedness judgements of these concepts to construct individual semantic networks. Higher expertise was associated with richer and more diverse schemata, more individualized networks, higher clustering coefficients, shorter average shortest path lengths, and unchanged modularity. Node-level analyses showed that fluency enhanced the structure of basic concepts, while the full advantage of experts emerged through integration of advanced concepts. These findings link expertise to more efficient and differentiated semantic networks, suggesting a mechanism by which knowledge organization supports expert-level cognition.
Description
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Cite as
Tameling, J., Wagner, V., & Jacobsen, T. (2026). Mind the Bind: Mapping Expertise in Semantic Schemata Using Network Science. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 48. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bn5r9c7
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Published version
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