On the origin of intermediate effects in clinical case recall

In two experiments, the effects of level of medical expertise and study time on free recall of a clinical case were assessed. In Experiment 1, a nonmonotonic relationship between level of expertise and recall was found: Subjects of intermediate levels of expertise remembered more information from the case than both experts and novices. This “intermediate effect” disappeared, however,when study time was restricted. Analysis of post hoc acquired protocols of pathophysiological knowledge active during case processing suggested that this phenomenon could be attributed to the nature of the pathophysiological knowledge mobilized to comprehend the case. In Experiment 2, this assumption was directly tested by priming relevant pathophysiological knowledge for either a short or a longer period, before enabling subjects to study the case briefly. Free-recall data confirmed and extended the results of Experiment 1. Again, an intermediate effect was found; this time, however, it was generated experimentally. The findings were interpreted in terms of qualitative differences in the nature of the knowledge structures underlying performance between novices, advanced students, and medical experts: Experts use knowledge in an encapsulated mode while comprehending a case, whereas students use elaborated knowledge.     

专家医生的知识结构及诊断推理方式

医学专长研究中“中间者效应”的发现,引发了研究者对专家医生知识结构的探讨。在“知识打包”的基础上,医生的临床知识以“疾病脚本”的方式组织起来。随着临床经验的增加,专家医生积累了丰富的疾病脚本。在临床诊断中,他们无需对病人所有的体征和症状进行仔细地和系统地分析,而是通过非分析性的推理方式——“模式识别”或“样例识别”便可自动激活与之匹配的疾病脚本,据此对病人做出迅速而准确的诊断。医学专长的本质就在于专家医生以“疾病脚本”的方式组织起来的知识结构。“适应性专长”代表了未来医学专长研究的新方向     

Communication,Influence, and Informational Asymmetries among Voters

The costs of political information vary dramatically across individuals, and these costs help explain why some individuals become politically expert while others demonstrate low levels of political knowledge and awareness. An attractive alternative, particularly for those with high information costs, is to rely on information and advice taken from others who are politically expert. This paper focuses on the complications that arise when the informant and the recipient do not share preferences. A series of small group experiments show that subjects tend to weight expertise more heavily than shared preferences in selecting informants, thereby exposing themselves to diverse views and biased information. Experimental subjects employ several heuristic devices in evaluating the reliability of this information, but depending on their own levels of information, these heuristics often lead subjects either to dismiss advice that conflicts with their own prior judgments or to dismiss advice that comes from an informant with divergent preferences. Hence these heuristics produce important consequences for patterns of political influence, as well as reducing the potential for political change.     

Diagnostic classification by experts and novices.

The present study examines differences between experts and novices in classifying symptoms and the effect of the nature of the task on classifying. The study involved three groups of subjects, two expert groups (n = 12, n = 10) and one novice group (n = 12). Thinking-aloud protocols were collected for two classification tasks: sorting of behavioural symptoms into predefined categories and intuitive clustering of behavioural symptoms. In a third task, experts and novices were asked to make typicality ratings of behavioural symptoms. The protocols were analyzed with respect to seven cognitive operations: (a) asking or giving information, (b) associating, (c) abstracting or labelling, (d) explaining, (e) neutral matching, (f) identifying, and (g) differentiating. Results showed an effect of experience and an effect of the task on the relative frequencies of these operations. No differences were found in typicality rating of experts versus novices. These contradictory findings are discussed in relation to Kolodner's model about the evolution of expertise.     

Prototypicality of arguments and conformity to ingroup norms

Social categorization is claimed to elicit a tendency to conform to ingroup norms, which may result in attitude change after exposure to information on the opinions of other ingroup members. It was hypothesized that the degree to which arguments represented ingroup norms, i.e., were prototypical, would affect their potential influence on attitudes, such that prototypical arguments would be perceived as being of higher quality and would elicit more attitude change. Moreover, prototypical arguments were expected to elicit more argument elaboration. Two experiments were designed to test these predictions. In Experiment 1 subjects were exposed to both a set of pro and a set of contra arguments, while one of the sets was allegedly prototypical of ingroup attitudes. In Experiment 2 subjects were exposed to either prototypical or a-prototypical pro or contra arguments allegedly originating from in- or outgroup. In both studies conformity to ingroup norms was observed. In addition, prototypical ingroup arguments elicited higher quality ratings in the first study. Indications of higher elaboration of prototypical ingroup arguments were found.     

Expert memory: the interaction of stimulus structure,attention, and expertise

This experiment focuses on the three‐way interaction between domain‐relevant structure, attention to domain‐relevant structure, and expertise in their effect on recall for field‐hockey information. It was predicted that experts' recall would decrease with the amount of domain‐relevant structure, but only when they were able to attend to the structure within the stimuli. Novices' recall was not predicted to vary with these factors. The study used a 3 × 2 × 2 mixed‐design with one between‐subjects factor, field hockey expertise (expert and novice), and two within‐subjects factors, domain‐relevant structure (high, moderate and low) and attention to structure (attending and non‐attending). Twenty‐four experts and 24 novices each listened to six audio‐taped scenarios (1 in each of the 6 structure × attention conditions) describing a sequence of field hockey play and recall was tested. The results demonstrated significant main effects for expertise, structure, and attention, and interactions of (a) structure and expertise, and (b) structure and attention. Importantly, the significant structure, attention, and expertise interaction provided the first direct empirical support for the constraint attunement hypothesis (Vicente and Wang, 1998 ) and for that aspect of the template theory (Gobet and Simon, 1996a , b ). Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Contributions of visual and embodied expertise to body perception

Recent research has demonstrated that our perception of the human body differs from that of inanimate objects. This study investigated whether the visual perception of the human body differs from that of other animate bodies and, if so, whether that difference could be attributed to visual experience and/or embodied experience. To dissociate differential effects of these two types of expertise, inversion effects (recognition of inverted stimuli is slower and less accurate than recognition of upright stimuli) were compared for two types of bodies in postures that varied in typicality: humans in human postures (human-typical), humans in dog postures (human-atypical), dogs in dog postures (dog-typical), and dogs in human postures (dog-atypical). Inversion disrupts global configural processing. Relative changes in the size and presence of inversion effects reflect changes in visual processing. Both visual and embodiment expertise predict larger inversion effects for human over dog postures because we see humans more and we have experience producing human postures. However, our design that crosses body type and typicality leads to distinct predictions for visual and embodied experience. Visual expertise predicts an interaction between typicality and orientation: greater inversion effects should be found for typical over atypical postures regardless of body type. Alternatively, embodiment expertise predicts a body, typicality, and orientation interaction: larger inversion effects should be found for all human postures but only for atypical dog postures because humans can map their bodily experience onto these postures. Accuracy data supported embodiment expertise with the three-way interaction. However, response-time data supported contributions of visual expertise with larger inversion effects for typical over atypical postures. Thus, both types of expertise affect the visual perception of bodies.     

Developmental trends in children’s typicality judgments

Category typicality norms from 12 natural language categories are presented for kindergarten, third-grade, sixth-grade, and college students. Subjects first selected examples of familiar word concepts and rated them on a 3-point scale in terms of category typicality. Age differences in the percentage of items included as category members were found primarily for the less typical items, with inclusion rates varying as a function of both age and typicality level. The absolute level of typicality judgments increased with age, although correlations between the children’s and college students’ ratings were generally significant for all three children’s groups, with average correlations increasing somewhat with age. It was suggested that the rating data would be useful to developmental investigators interested in children’s processing of category information.     

Facilitation of attitude formation through communication: how perceived source expertise enhances the ability to achieve cognitive closure about complex environmental topics

Attitudes on which people have achieved cognitive closure are better predictors of future attitudes and behavior than open attitudes. In two experiments, we found that factors in communication (source identity, source consensus) can enhance people's ability to achieve cognitive closure on complex environmental topics through an increase in perceived source expertise. Results showed that participants perceived higher levels of source expertise and felt better able to achieve cognitive closure on the environmental technology of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) when the information source had an expert identity compared to a non‐expert identity. The communication of consensus by the information source increased the level of expertise ascribed to the non‐expert source, resulting in an enhanced ability to achieve closure.     

Analogical transfer and expertise in legal reasoning

Analogical transfer and its relation to expertise is examined in a legal context. Three experiments were conducted comparing the performance of novices (introductory tax students) and of experts (experienced tax practitioners from multinational public accounting firms) on tasks involving the application of tax laws. In Experiment 1 subjects completed a target problem after reading a decided case that was either analogous or not analogous to a target problem. A limited amount of transfer was observed, with no differential rate of transfer across experience levels. In Experiments 2 and 3 attempts were made to facilitate transfer of knowledge by inducing transfer-appropriate processing of the source analog and by providing multiple source analogs. The results of both experiments indicate an interaction between treatment and expertise. Unexpectedly, the facilitating treatments reduced the transfer of knowledge for experts while increasing the transfer for novices. Subsequent analysis of the responses of the expert subjects indicates that for the more experienced expert subjects a highly proceduralized rule interfered with the knowledge transfer when that rule was made salient by the facilitating treatments. The less experienced expert subjects behaved in a manner consistent with the hypotheses. This poor performance of the more experienced experts results from the inflexibility in expert problem solving due to the proceduralization of information processing. Frensch and Sternberg (1989) demonstrate that this type of inflexibility is one of the costs of expertise and results from the development of a large and highly complex knowledge base containing numerous well developed strategies.     

‘Most advanced,yet acceptable’: Typicality and novelty as joint predictors of aesthetic preference in industrial design

Typicality and novelty have often been shown to be related to aesthetic preference of human artefacts. Since a typical product is rarely new and, conversely, a novel product will not often be designated as typical, the positive effects of both features seem incompatible. In three studies it was shown that typicality (operationalized as ‘goodness of example’) and novelty are jointly and equally effective in explaining the aesthetic preference of consumer products, but that they suppress each other's effect. Direct correlations between both variables and aesthetic preference were not significant, but each relationship became highly significant when the influence of the other variable was partialed out. In Study 2, it was furthermore demonstrated that the expertise level of observers did not affect the relative contribution of novelty and typicality. It was finally shown (Study 3) that a more ‘objective’ measure of typicality, central tendency — operationalized as an exemplar's average similarity to all other members of the category — yielded the same effect of typicality on aesthetic preference. In sum, all three studies showed that people prefer novel designs as long as the novelty does not affect typicality, or, phrased differently, they prefer typicality given that this is not to the detriment of novelty. Preferred are products with an optimal combination of both aspects.     

Expertise, Democracy, and Applied Ethics

Is expertise in applied ethics compatible with individual autonomy and democratic self-governance? This depends on whether a ‘tracking condition’ is satisfied for expert claims about issues in applied ethics. This condition requires that, when expert deliberations are properly conducted they ‘track’ the courses of reasoning that the experts’ clients would themselves have undertaken if they had (perhaps subject to certain conditions) considered the matters for themselves. Pluralism of the kind thematised by Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire suggests that the tracking condition typically will not be satisfied and, hence, that whatever experts are praticising in applied ethics they are doing it contrary to democratic principles of autonomy and self-government. The implications of this result are sketched and some standard objections briefly considered.     

Examining Reasoning Skill Differences Between Expert and Novice Counselors

There is increasing interest in identifying the complex cognitive skills that constitute counseling expertise. Research from cognitive psychology suggests significant differences between experts and novices in their reasoning. This study examines the reasoning of expert and novice counselors engaged in a diagnostic task. Cases varied on “problem structure”—the extent to which problem-relevant information was clear and apparent. While an expertise by problem structure interaction was hypothesized, most of the differences were found across case type. Results suggest that the structure of the diagnostic problem may be an important variable affecting reasoning. The importance of problem structure for future research and training is discussed.     

The Personality and Emotions of Men

Summary

The present study investigated the effect of required effort (moderate vs. low), level of expertise (“Dr.” vs. “Mr.”), and sex of the psychologist on compliance with the recommendations of school psychologists. One hundred forty-four elementary school teachers served as subjects. The psychologists evaluated a child from each teacher's class and recommended that she send for materials which would help the child's perceptual and reading development. Results indicate that compliance varied directly with required effort, but was unrelated to level of expertise and sex. It is argued that psychologists in schools may influence teachers as a function of legitimate power, whereas expert power is operative when dealing with the public.     

Inductive Reasoning in Alzheimer''s Disease

We evaluated knowledge of basic level and superordinate semantic relations and the role of cognitive resources during inductive reasoning in probable Alzheimer's disease (AD). Nineteen mildly demented AD patients and 17 healthy control subjects judged the truthfulness of arguments with a premise and a conclusion that contain familiar concepts coupled with "blank" predicates, such as "Spiders contain phosphatidylcholine; therefore all insects contain phosphatidylcholine." Like healthy control subjects, AD patients were relatively insensitive to the typicality of the premise category when judging the strength of arguments with a conclusion containing a basic-level concept, but were relatively sensitive to typicality during judgments of arguments containing a superordinate in the conclusion. Moreover, AD patients resembled control subjects in judging arguments with an immediate superordinate in the conclusion compared to arguments with a distant superordinate. AD patients differed from control subjects because they could not take advantage of two premises in an argument containing basic-level concepts. We conclude that semantic knowledge is sufficiently preserved in AD to support inductive reasoning, but that limited cognitive resources may interfere with AD patients' ability to consider the entire spectrum of information available during semantic challenges.