Cased-Based Reasoning by Human Experts

Abstract

The central insight that led to the field of Case-Based Reasoning was that human memory appears to be organized around individual episodic experiences (Schank, 1982; Kolodner, 1980). At the time, there were few empirical findings available that shed light on how humans encode, retrieve, and reason about complex experiences. In the twenty years since then, researchers in cognitive science have investigated both everyday autobiographical memory and the performance of human experts who process many individual cases within a domain, such as medical diagnosis. The results identify some important features of the case-based reasoning process in humans, and suggest new approaches to building computational models that may display similar capabilities.