ABSTRACT
I t is a great honor to participate in this symposium honoring the scientific work of Bill Chase. Author Roger Schvaneveldt was fortunate to work with Bill as a fellow graduate student at Wisconsin in the 1960s, a time of great ferment in cognitive psychology. Roger learned many things from Bill—among them were rigor, not to beg the question (in the proper sense of the expression), to enjoy doing research, and the fruits of collaboration (Schvaneveldt & Chase, 1969). Much of Roger's work was also inspired by Bill's later work in expertise (Chase & Simon, 1973), and while the material we present for this symposium is not directly on expertise, it is inspired by the recognition that expertise involves acquiring extensive knowledge. The work is also intimately concerned with search, a theme central to much of Bill's work. Search is an essential aspect of discovery. One goal of our work is to provide some tools to aid the development of expertise by identifying new connections among ideas. Such new connections are central to building chunks, another of Bill's key ideas about expertise. Some of the new connections we identify may just be new for a particular investigator, but we are also interested in assisting in the discovery of new connections that have not been made in a scientific community. In short, we are tackling one aspect of scientific discovery.
