Lee R. Brooks

The suppression of visualization by reading

Four experiments are described which demonstrate a conflict between reading verbal messages and imagining the spatial relations described by those messages. Listening to the same messages did not produce comparable interference with visualization. The conflict between reading and visualizing was obtained even when the subject previously had seen the referent of the message. In contrast, when the subject was induced to treat the messages as rote strings of words instead of visualizing their referents, reading was a more effective means of presentation than was listening. Two interpretations of these results were proposed. (a) Visualization and reading compete of the use of neural pathways specialized for visual perception. (b) The process of reading hinders the conversion of input material into any non-verbal form; that is, reading forces the subject to deal with information in a more exclusively verbal form than does listening. It was suggested that regardless of interpretation this method provides a means of investigating the internal processes underlying concrete verbal reference.

Nonanalytic Cognition: Memory, Perception, and Concept Learning

Publisher Summary This chapter presents evidence that challenges major points in the usual, divergent treatment of perception, categorization, and episodic memory. Perceptual and categorical processing cannot be assumed to depend on high-level units that change only over many trials and that are relatively independent of context. The effect of attentive processing need not be the systematically discarded information about surface characteristics; many perceptual and conceptual judgments depend upon nominally irrelevant information about a source and format. Both generalizing and explicitly episodic memory tasks can be accomplished in several ways. The analytic extreme, emphasized in a usual cognitive framework, depends solely on relevant information. A nonanalytic procedure depends on tightly integrated combinations of relevant and irrelevant information. Perceptual identification and conceptual judgments are no less variable or context dependent than explicit memory for episodes. The chapter discusses the effects on perception and categorization of manipulations that have traditionally been employed in investigations of explicit episodic memory tasks.

Specializing the operation of an explicit rule

The effect of practice on the operative form of a rule was investigated by giving subjects an easy, perfectly predictive classification rule, followed by training in applying that rule to a set of practice items. On a subsequent transfer test, the accuracy and speed of classifying new items was strongly affected by similarity to previously seen items, suggesting that the effect of practice was not simply to automatize the rule. The effect occurred with pictorial, easily integrated stimuli, but not with lists of verbally stated features. Subjects generally did not have insight into the role of previous items in their performance. This dependence on prior episodes may be frequent in ecologically common conditions and is of special interest when the categorization rule becomes uncertain, as when a rule has only heuristic value.

Non-analytical models of clinical reasoning: the role of experience

Objective  This paper aims to summarise the evidence supporting the role of experience‐based, non‐analytic reasoning (NAR) or pattern recognition as a central feature of expert medical diagnosis.

Salience of Item Knowledge in Learning Artificial Grammars

Both the specific similarity of test items to study items and the grammaticality of test items were found to be major determinants of performance under task conditions common in the literature. Results bearing on the issue of how item-specific effects are coordinated with knowledge pooled across items are: (a) Better item memory resulted in smaller rather than larger effects of specific similarity on judgments of grammaticality, suggesting that items can be too well differentiated to support transfer to new items, (b) Variation in the effect of specific similarity did not result in compensatory variation in grammaticality, suggesting that any scheme that tightly links the effects of the two variables is insufficient, (c) Differential reliance on the 2 knowledge resources was not under good instructional control, which poses a problem for accounts that use functional task analyses to coordinate functionally different memories.

The value of basic science in clinical diagnosis: creating coherence among signs and symptoms

Background  We investigated whether learning basic science mechanisms may have mnemonic value in helping students remember signs and symptoms, in comparison with learning the relation between symptoms and diagnoses directly.

Expertise in visual diagnosis: a review of the literature.

No abstract available.

Teaching from the clinical reasoning literature: combined reasoning strategies help novice diagnosticians overcome misleading information

Objective  Previous research has revealed a pedagogical benefit of instructing novice diagnosticians to utilise a combined approach to clinical reasoning (familiarity‐driven pattern recognition combined with a careful consideration of the presenting features) when diagnosing electrocardiograms (ECGs). This paper reports 2 studies demonstrating that the combined instructions are especially valuable in helping students overcome biasing influences.

The Non-Analytical Basis of Clinical Reasoning

This paper explores the assertion that much of clinical diagnostic thinking is based on the rapid and unconscious matching of the presenting problem to a similar, previously encountered, problem. This ‘non-analytic’ form of concept formation has been described in the psychology literature for over a decade. From this theory, we deduce and test several hypotheses: 1) Diagnosis is based in part on similarity to a particular previous example. In studies in dermatology, specific similarity accounts for about 30% of diagnosis. 2) When experts err, these errors are as likely as novices to occur on typical presentations. For residents, general practitioners and dermatologists, about 40% of errors were on typical slides. 3) Features are re-interpreted in light of diagnostic hypotheses. In radiology, attaching a standard positive history to the film bag increased the number of features seen on both normal and abnormal films by about 50%. 4) Experts cannot predict errors of other experts. In dermatology, experts predicted only 11–60% of errors committed by their colleagues. We conclude that amassing prior instances is an important component of expertise, and education should recognize this element.

Perceptual manifestations of an analytic structure: The priority of holistic individuation.

Properties that make items perceptually distinctive may not be represented in the dimensional structure used by subjects for analysis. In a classification task, a single dimensional structure, actually used by subjects when analyzing, occurred in several perceptual forms. Two types of perceptual variation were compared: (a) feature individuation, whether a feature occurs in a unique form in different items and (b) holistic individuation, the extent to which an items features cohere into an individuated whole. These types of individuation had separate effects on exemplar-based classification. However, holistic individuation had priority in that the presence of individuated features did not produce exemplar-based transfer if the items holistic properties were altered. This priority of holistic individuation occurred whether the subjects had been given the classification rule or had attempted to discover it.