Experts, who were the sole active dispensers of certain kinds of knowledge in the days before AI, have now often assumed a rather passive role. They relay their knowledge to various novices, knowledge engineers, experimental psychologists or cognitivists - or other experts! - involved in the development and understanding of expert systems. This book achieves a perfect marriage between experimentalists and theoreticians who deal with expertise. It tries to establish the benefits to society of an advanced technology for representing and disseminating the knowledge and skills of the best corporate managers, the most seasoned pilots, and the most renowned medical diagnosticians. This book interests psychologists as well as all those out in the trenches developing expert systems, and everyone pondering the nature of expertise and the question of how it can be studied scientifically. Its scope, the pivotal concepts which it elucidates and brilliantly summarizes and appraises in the final chapter, as well as the references it includes, make this book a landmark in the field.

I. Introduction.- 1. Doing Psychology in an AI Context: A Personal Perspective and Introduction to This Volume.- 2. Knowledge and Knowledge Acquisition in the Computational Context.- II. Cognitive Theory and Expertise.- 3. Modeling Human Expertise in Expert Systems.- 4. Mental Models and the Acquisition of Expert Knowledge.- 5. Conceptual Analysis as a Basis for Knowledge Acquisition.- III. Knowledge Elicitation Methods.- 6. Implications of Cognitive Theory for Knowledge Acquisition.- 7. Knowledge Acquisition and Constructivist Epistemology.- 8. Eliciting and Using Experiential Knowledge and General Expertise.- 9. Managing and Documenting the Knowledge Acquisition Process.- 10. Using Knowledge Engineering to Preserve Corporate Memory.- IV. Psychological Research on Expertise.- 11. On Being an Expert: A Cost-Benefit Analysis.- 12. Mnemonics and Expert Knowledge: Mental Cuing.- 13. The Role of General Ability in Cognitive Complexity: A Case Study of Expertise.- V. Expert-Novice Differences and the Development of Expertise.- 14. Expert-Novice Differences and Knowledge Elicitation.- 15. When Novices Elicit Knowledge: Question Asking in Designing, Evaluating, and Learning to Use Software.- 16. The Programmer's Burden: Developing Expertise in Programming.- VI. Overview.- 17. The Psychology of Expertise and Knowledge Acquisition: Comments on the Chapters in This Volume.- Appendix A. Bibliography: Psychological Theory and Reviews.- Appendix B. Bibliography: Empirical and Experimental Investigations of Expertise.- Appendix C. Bibliography: Knowledge Elicitation.- Appendix D. Bibliography: Automated Knowledge Elicitation, Representation, and Instantiation ("Knowledge Acquisition").- Appendix E. Bibliography: Expertise in Programming.- Appendix F. Bibliography: AI Theory,Philosophy, and Reviews of Expert Systems.- Appendix G. Bibliography: Applications of Expert Systems.- Appendix H. Bibliography: Programming, Building, and Verifying Expert Systems.- Author Index.