Approaching text genre: How contextualized experience shapes task-specific performance

In the present study, we sought to clarify how differences in contextualized experience influence the performance of participants engaged in genre decision-making. Using a simple learning algorithm, we ran a series of computational simulations to model the effects that context and cue competition have on the way readers of different backgrounds make genre decisions. Next, we used the results of those simulations as predictions for our behavioural genre decision experiment. Differences in test performance were strongly influenced by the factors that have long been known to influence learning: Cue competition and its embedding in a specific context jointly modulate what gets learned and that inevitably affects later performance. We discuss our findings in the context of learning and literary genres.