How do experts differ from novices in terms of attention?

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

When analyzing how experts differ from novices in attention, we need to compare what each group tends to notice and what they ignore.
Option 1 asserts that experts and novices attend to the same features. In reality, expertise changes what is salient: experts pick up patterns, relations, and underlying structure rather than surface details. This makes Option 1 inaccurate because it ignores the qualitative shift in attention that comes with expertise.
Option 2 claims that experts focus on superficial, surface-level features. This contradicts well-established findings in expertise research, which show that novices are more likely to fixate on obvious surface features, while experts move beyond them to deeper patterns. The statement mischaracterizes how expertise alters perception, so it is incorrect.
Option 3 states that experts focus on deep structure and contextually-relevant features. This aligns with research showing that domain knowledge allows experts to recognize underlying principles, organize information around core schemas, and pick features that signal meaningful relationships within a context. This explains why experts perform better on complex problems by attending to what truly matters for understanding and problem-solving. Therefore, this option is the correct characterization of expert attention.
Option 4 contends that experts focus on the individual parts of problems, whereas novices chunk the relevant parts together. This reverses the common pattern: novices often mischunk and attend to isolated parts, while experts chunk information into meaningful units and perceive the problem as integrated wholes. As a result, this option inaccurately describes the typical attentional strategy of experts and is incorrect.

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How do experts differ from novices in terms of attention?

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