Coordination of general and specific knowledge in categorization and diagnosis

在许多复杂的领域，人们被赋予了明确的规则，并被要求学习如何应用这些规则。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方面显然是有用的，但它们没有描述在学习过程中获得的对特定感知外观的依赖。此外，它们没有暗示可接受的外观的多样性，而且通常也没有具体说明完成诊断所需的证据数量。然而，这些规则充其量是口头上可以做到的。我的研究旨在了解这种语言知识是如何与更多的感官知识相协调的，这显然是变得擅长诊断所必需的。更广泛地说，我感兴趣的是一般类型的知识，如归纳概括和明确传达的规则，如何与从具体案例中获得的知识相协调。

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.