Knowledge acquisition and information searching strategies in diagnostic decision making

The effect of three learning procedures on diagnostic information searching strategies was investigated. Undergraduate students acquired an artificial knowledge domain through either a Taxonomic-, Inductive-, or Case-oriented knowledge acquisition procedure. The use of the competing-hypotheses heuristic as a practical strategy to guide decision making in the face of uncertainty, was compared among the three learning conditions and between each condition and a non-learning control group using the method developed by Kern and Doherty (1982) and Wolf et al. (1985). The small instruction intervention had an effect on the diagnostic nature of subjects' information-searching strategies. Subjects in the Inductive-learning condition exhibited a stronger tendency to seek diagnostically worthless information than the other learning conditions. The outcomes are considered relevant to the nature of expertise in decision making, and to the effect of instruction methodologies on the knowledge representations available to diagnostic classification and decision-making processes.