........ published in NEWSLETTER # 46
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........ published in NEWSLETTER # 46
ADVANCED MODELS OF COGNITION FOR MEDICAL TRAINING AND PRACTICE
by Professor D.A. Evans, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh/PA (U.S.A.) and Professor V.L. Patel, McGill University, Montreal/PQ (Canada)
This volume (NATO ASI SERIES F97) is composed of twenty-three papers from a NATO Advanced Research Workshop held at Hotel Il Ciocco in Tuscany, Italy, in June 1991. The participants in the workshop examined the impact of models of cognition on medical training and practice and outlined future research programs to relate cognition and education.
The papers of the volume range over topics including expert systems and medical informatics, cognitive psychology, and applications of cognitive psychology and informatics to teaching and learning systems. A special section is devoted to papers by `decision makers', deans of medical schools and presidents of medical school organizations, who offer their views on the implementation and practical utilization of various programs of cognitive- science research.
One important outcome of the workshop, reflected in many papers, was the discovery that artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and medical decision making are considerably closer, both conceptually and theoretically, than many participants originally thought. There is a clear confluence, for example, in trends towards (a) the use of causal modeling, (b) the integration of probabilistic techniques into models of semantic representations, and (c) the exploitation of explanation and abduction as basic techniques for learning and problem solving. These themes are especially apparent in the papers that focus on the interaction between cognitive science and expert systems and expert modeling in medicine.
Another theme in the volume is the practical question of how best to apply cognitive-scientific techniques in real-world medical environments. Several directions for future research are identified. One direction targets the user of systems or techniques. Another targets the problem of evaluation, particularly the inadequacies of epidemiological models as a basis of analyzing the outcomes of complex systems. There is general agreement among the papers that traditional methods of assessment in medicine must be supplemented (and sometimes wholly replaced) by methods that support more explicitly the analysis of cognitive processes and of how knowledge is developed and used.
Reference books: F67, F76, F78, F80, F81, F84, F85, F86, F87, F89, F90, F91, F92, F93, F96, F97, F104, F105