General knowledge is information that has been accumulated over time through various mediums and sources. It excludes specialized learning that can only be obtained with extensive training and information confined to a single medium. General knowledge is an essential component of crystallized intelligence. It is strongly associated with general intelligence and with

openness to experience Openness to experience is one of the domains which are used to describe human personality in the Five Factor Model. Openness involves six facets, or dimensions: active imagination (fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, ...

. Studies have found that people who are highly knowledgeable in a particular

domain Domain may refer to: Mathematics *Domain of a function, the set of input values for which the (total) function is defined ** Domain of definition of a partial function **Natural domain of a partial function **Domain of holomorphy of a function *Do ...

tend to be knowledgeable in many. General knowledge is thought to be supported by long-term

semantic memory Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge that humans have accumulated throughout their lives. This general knowledge (word meanings, concepts, facts, and ideas) is intertwined in experience and dependent on culture. We can learn about ...

ability. General knowledge also supports schemata for textual understanding.

Individual differences

Intelligence

High scorers on tests of general knowledge tend to also score highly on intelligence tests. IQ has been found to robustly predict general knowledge scores even after accounting for differences in age, and

five-factor model The Big Five personality traits is a suggested taxonomy, or grouping, for personality traits, developed from the 1980s onward in psychological trait theory. Starting in the 1990s, the theory identified five factors by labels, for the US English ...

personality traits. However, many general knowledge tests are designed to create a normal distribution of answers, creating a bell-shaped curve. General knowledge is also moderately associated with verbal ability, though only weakly or not at all with numerical and spatial ability.