Experts solve problems differently than do beginners. They rapidly identify patterns, prioritise available data and seek out the information that will most effi-ciendy allow them to reach a solution. They can identify common scenarios that can be resolved with few additional data, as opposed to those that require deliberate reasoning from first principles. In general, they have efficient problem-solving strategies that allow them to arrive rapidly at the most likely set of diagnoses. The one thing experts generally cannot do, however, is articulate the mental processes by which they accomplish all this. Thus, theoretical models are needed to explain how experts think. One model proposes that experts, through long experience, develop intuitive 'scripts' that operate autonomously, beneath the level of conscious awareness. Scripts consist of prepositional, probabilistic networks of relationships among large numbers of items. In approaching an ambiguous clinical situation, experts are thought to map the available information onto the most appropriate scripts.
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