CONCEPTS, CATEGORIES, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Why are psychologists not often called on for their expertise in connection with the larger problems of society? The nature of expertise is analyzed in the framework of a theory of concept formation and categorization. Expert-novice differences in approaches to problems, and, more generally, the nature of abstraction and judgment, are interpreted in terms of cognitive processes that operate by computations on an instance-based composite memory. Applied to ''growing pains'' of psychological science, the theory has implications for graduate training and the direction of research support.