Representation, categorisation and evaluation: Differences between experts and novices in the domain of antique furniture.

The objective of our research was to identify experts' characteristics regarding the structure and the coherence of their representations as well as their evaluations of stimuli in their domain of expertise. In the present study, we were interested in how experts and novices in the domain of antique furniture represent, categorize, and evaluate ancient furniture in different sorting and evaluation tasks. The results show that experts have more hierarchical representations than novices. Experts use more criteria to establish a graded structure of the category much less than antique armchairs much greater than. They have more coherent representations, and there is in experts a stronger link between global evaluations and underlying dimensions. In addition, experts are more extreme than novices when they evaluate stimuli in their domain of expertise.