Coordination of general and specific knowledge in categorization and diagnosis

在许多复杂的领域，人们被赋予明确的规则，并要求学习应用它们。例如，医学诊断师通常从医学院的第一天开始学习规则。这些标准的、权威的规则在学习识别医学疾病时显然是有用的，但它们并没有描述在学习过程中获得的对特定感知外观的依赖性。此外，它们并不暗示可接受的外观的多样性，并且通常不指定完成诊断所需的证据量。 然而，这些规则是在最好的，可以口头上做。我的研究旨在了解这种语言知识是如何与更感性的知识相协调的，这显然是成为善于诊断所必需的。更一般地说，我感兴趣的是一般类型的知识，如归纳概括以及明确传达的规则，是如何与特定情况下获得的知识协调。

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.