Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we examine the role of domain knowledge in the process of hypothesis generation and problem representation during diagnostic reasoning. An on-line task environment and the combination of discourse and protocol analysis techniques were used to test the differences between two groups of experts solving a clinical problem. The groups consisted of high domain knowledgesubjects (HDK) -endocrinologists- and low domain-knowledge (LDK) subjects cardiologists-. TTie results show that HDK subjects used a more efficient process of diagnostic reasoning as generated a more coherent representation of the problem. A two-stage model describing the process of hypothesis generation was proposed to explain the differences in theprocess of hypothesis generation.