The Cueing Effect in Retrieval of Expertise: Designing for Future Intelligent Knowledge Management System

Abstract

Along with the rapid technological developments in the past few decades, human work is becoming more knowledge-based, and professional expertise is becoming even more important. In this way, effective methods to retrieve and transfer such expertise are greatly needed. Prior research has found that pictures can be used as visual cues for supporting general memory retrieval, but whether this effect can be used to support professional expertise retrieval is not fully understood. The aim of the present study is to explore whether the picture cues can support the retrieval of professional expertise in a typical mechanical fault diagnosis task. Sixteen postgraduates who majored in mechanics with vehicle repair experience took part in the study. On the first day, they were trained for 1.5 h on a simulated vehicle maintenance and repair task. After that, they were asked to accomplish three fault diagnosis tasks. On the next day, they participated in a 30-min expertise retrieval test. In the test, they were presented with or without picture cues (i.e., key-picture-cue, random-picture-cue, and without cues) and then answered questions to measure their memory over yesterday’s operations. The results showed that participants retrieved more accurately with picture-cues compared to the scenario without the cues, and the accuracy in the key-picture-cues scenario was higher than the random-picture-cues scenario. These results show a robust cueing effect in the retrieval of expertise in fault diagnosis operations and indicated a potential application of expertise retrieval and transfer when designing an intelligent knowledge management system in the future.