Coordination of general and specific knowledge in categorization and diagnosis

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In many complex fields, people are given explicit rules and asked to learn to apply them. Medical diagnosticians, for example, normally learn rules from the first day of medical school. These standard, authoritative rules are clearly useful in learning to identify medical disorders, but they do not describe the dependence on particular perceptual appearances that is acquired during the course of learning. Further, they do not hint at the variety of acceptable appearances, and the amount of evidence required to complete a diagnosis is generally not specified. Yet, these rules are presented at the best that can be done verbally. My research is aimed at understanding how this verbal knowledge is coordinated with the more perceptual knowledge that is clearly necessary to become good at diagnosis. More generally, I am interested in how general types of knowledge, such as induced generalizations as well as explicitly communicated rules, are coordinated with the knowledge gained with specific cases.