Distributed expertise: motivation to explore alternative approaches

The authors examine expert system structures and their potential uses in a large psychotherapy research program, which is attempting to examine conscious and unconscious mental processes from a number of perspectives. These include clinical psychodynamics, cognitive science, linguistics, medical anthropology, social psychology, and many others. The program involves multiple experts of different but contiguous or overlapping domains, who perform collaborative coordinated intensive single case studies of psychotherapy sessions. The subjects are individuals who have clearly demonstrable psychopathologies (e.g. pathological grief responses), but who otherwise would be considered high-functioning and normal by most people. The model used in the development of the present system, PSYCLOPS, an interactive high-resolution graphic display system, asserts that in addition to a unique set of measures with knowable reliability and validity, any expert has the capacity to translate technical details into expressions or images meaningful to others with different types or levels of expertise