Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper examines the performance of cardiologists, psychiatrists, and surgeons indiagnostic explanations of cases within and outside their domain. The protocols were analyzed by techniques of transforming a propositional representation into a semantic network. Some graph theoretic criteria for analyzing semantic networks are used for precision of analysis. The results show that the subjects interpret cases in terms of the familiar component of the problem, using specific domain knowledge. This is related to forward directed reasoning. Unfamiliar or uncertaincomponents of the disorder are either ignored or explained using backward reasoning strategies. Atendency to move from a forward driven strategy to a backward driven strategy and vice versa is alsoseen in sc.ne protocols. This sequence is repeated a number of times to form a chain consisting offorward/backward reasoning sequences. This has implications for how subsequent patientinformation is processed in order to make decisions for treatment and management