ABSTRACT
When people lack sufficient domain-specific knowledge to solve a novel problem, they are often able to fall back on more abstract knowledge that is useful in a variety of domains. Much of this ab
stract knowledge is culturally shared: It is knowledge that most full-grown people in a given culture would consider "common sense." Having exhausted one's idiosyncratic or domain-specific expertise, shared general knowledge of one's culture is available to help. In order to make use of this general knowledge, people must be capable of building specific knowledge structures out of general ones-of adapting general knowledge to a specific context.
