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Psychology Terms >> Fan Effect
Fan Effect
The fan effect is the finding that, if a subject is asked to verify whether some fact is true of some (imaginary) individual, the subject is slower if s/he has had to learn more facts about the individual.
When given the probe sentence about the individual to verify, the node that represents the individual is activated, and activation spreads out through the links attached to it.
If the activation reaches the node representing the other concept in the sentence (e.g. a node for "tall" if the sentence was "Mr. X is tall"), resulting in its activation, then the person can say "yes, the sentence is true."
The more links spreading away from the first node, about the individual, the less activation is available to spread down each individual link, so the slower the node for the other concept is activated. (it's enough to say "the more links, the less activation for each one).
However, someone who is expert about a topic and knows a lot about that topic can answer questions about it quickly and accurately.
The reason why experts aren't slow is because they have organized their knowledge about the topics they are expert about.
In network terms, they have lots of other connections between concepts that they know are related, and these other connections can speed their decisions up.
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