The Psychology of Expertise : Cognitive Research and Empirical AI

Experts, who were the sole active dispensers of certain kinds of knowledge in the days before AI, have now often assumed a rather passive role. They relay their knowledge to various novices, knowledge engineers, experimental psychologists or cognitivists - or other experts! - involved in the development and understanding of expert systems. This book achieves a perfect marriage between experimentalists and theoreticians who deal with expertise. It tries to establish the benefits to society of an advanced technology for representing and disseminating the knowledge and skills of the best corporate managers, the most seasoned pilots, and the most renowned medical diagnosticians. This book interests psychologists as well as all those out in the trenches developing expert systems, and everyone pondering the nature of expertise and the question of how it can be studied scientifically. Its scope, the pivotal concepts which it elucidates and brilliantly summarizes and appraises in the final chapter, as well as the references it includes, make this book a landmark in the field. Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Doing Psychology in an AI Context: A Personal Perspective and Introduction to This Volume....Pages 3-11 Knowledge and Knowledge Acquisition in the Computational Context....Pages 12-25 Front Matter....Pages 27-27 Modeling Human Expertise in Expert Systems....Pages 29-60 Mental Models and the Acquisition of Expert Knowledge....Pages 61-79 Conceptual Analysis as a Basis for Knowledge Acquisition....Pages 80-96 Front Matter....Pages 97-97 Implications of Cognitive Theory for Knowledge Acquisition....Pages 99-120 Knowledge Acquisition and Constructivist Epistemology....Pages 121-136 Eliciting and Using Experiential Knowledge and General Expertise....Pages 137-148 Managing and Documenting the Knowledge Acquisition Process....Pages 149-169 Using Knowledge Engineering to Preserve Corporate Memory....Pages 170-187 Front Matter....Pages 189-189 On Being an Expert: A Cost-Benefit Analysis....Pages 191-203 Mnemonics and Expert Knowledge: Mental Cuing....Pages 204-217 The Role of General Ability in Cognitive Complexity: A Case Study of Expertise....Pages 218-230 Front Matter....Pages 231-231 Expert-Novice Differences and Knowledge Elicitation....Pages 233-244 When Novices Elicit Knowledge: Question Asking in Designing, Evaluating, and Learning to Use Software....Pages 245-268 The Programmer’s Burden: Developing Expertise in Programming....Pages 269-294 Front Matter....Pages 295-295 The Psychology of Expertise and Knowledge Acquisition: Comments on the Chapters in This Volume....Pages 297-313 Back Matter....Pages 314-395

This volume investigates our ability to capture, and then apply, expertise. In recent years, expertise has come to be regarded as an increasingly valuable and surprisingly elusive resource. Experts, who were the sole active dispensers of certain kinds of knowledge in the days before AI, have themselves become the objects of empirical inquiry, in which their knowledge is elicited and studied — by knowledge engineers, experimental psychologists, applied psychologists, or other experts — involved in the development of expert systems. This book achieves a marriage between experimentalists, applied scientists, and theoreticians who deal with expertise. It envisions the benefits to society of an advanced technology for capturing and disseminating the knowledge and skills of the best corporate managers, the most seasoned pilots, and the most renowned medical diagnosticians. This book should be of interest to psychologists as well as to knowledge engineers who are "out in the trenches" developing expert systems, and anyone pondering the nature of expertise and the question of how it can be elicited and studied scientifically. The book's scope and the pivotal concepts that it elucidates and appraises, as well as the extensive categorized bibliographies it includes, make this volume a landmark in the field of expert systems and AI as well as the field of applied experimental psychology.