Coordination of Analytic and Similarity-Based Processing Strategies and Expertise in Dermatological Diagnosis

BACKGROUND: Medical diagnosis may be thought of as a categorization task. Research and theory in psychology as well as medical decision making indicate at least 2 processes by which this categorization task may be accomplished: (a) analytic processing, in which one makes explicit use of clinical features to reach a diagnosis, and (b) similarity-based processing, in which one makes use of past exemplars to reach a clinical diagnosis. Recent …