Home  About us  Contact
 

Cognitive Errors (cognitive + error)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Medical Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

How neurologists think: A cognitive psychology perspective on missed diagnoses,

ANNALS OF NEUROLOGY, Issue 4 2010
Barbara G. Vickrey MD
Physicians use heuristics or shortcuts in their decision making to help them sort through complex clinical information and formulate diagnoses efficiently. Practice would come to a halt without them. However, there are pitfalls to the use of certain heuristics, the same ones to which humans are prone in everyday life. It may be possible to improve clinical decision making through techniques that minimize biases inherent in heuristics. Five common clinical heuristics or other sources of cognitive error are illustrated through neurological cases with missed diagnoses, and literature from cognitive psychology and medicine are presented to support the occurrence of these errors in diagnostic reasoning as general phenomena. Articulation of the errors inherent in certain common heuristics alerts clinicians to their weaknesses as diagnosticians and should be beneficial to practice. Analysis of cases with missed diagnoses in teaching conferences might proceed along formal lines that identify the type of heuristic used and of inherent potential cognitive errors. Addressing these cognitive errors by becoming conscious of them is a useful tool in neurologic education and should facilitate a career-long process of continuous self-improvement. ANN NEUROL 2010;67:425,433 [source]

Achieving Quality in Clinical Decision Making: Cognitive Strategies and Detection of Bias

ACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE, Issue 11 2002
Pat Croskerry MD
Clinical decision making is a cornerstone of high-quality care in emergency medicine. The density of decision making is unusually high in this unique milieu, and a combination of strategies has necessarily evolved to manage the load. In addition to the traditional hypothetico-deductive method, emergency physicians use several other approaches, principal among which are heuristics. These cognitive short-cutting strategies are especially adaptive under the time and resource limitations that prevail in many emergency departments (EDs), but occasionally they fail. When they do, we refer to them as cognitive errors. They are costly but highly preventable. It is important that emergency physicians be aware of the nature and extent of these heuristics and biases, or cognitive dispositions to respond (CDRs). Thirty are catalogued in this article, together with descriptions of their properties as well as the impact they have on clinical decision making in the ED. Strategies are delineated in each case, to minimize their occurrence. Detection and recognition of these cognitive phenomena are a first step in achieving cognitive de-biasing to improve clinical decision making in the ED. [source]

How neurologists think: A cognitive psychology perspective on missed diagnoses,

ANNALS OF NEUROLOGY, Issue 4 2010
Barbara G. Vickrey MD
Physicians use heuristics or shortcuts in their decision making to help them sort through complex clinical information and formulate diagnoses efficiently. Practice would come to a halt without them. However, there are pitfalls to the use of certain heuristics, the same ones to which humans are prone in everyday life. It may be possible to improve clinical decision making through techniques that minimize biases inherent in heuristics. Five common clinical heuristics or other sources of cognitive error are illustrated through neurological cases with missed diagnoses, and literature from cognitive psychology and medicine are presented to support the occurrence of these errors in diagnostic reasoning as general phenomena. Articulation of the errors inherent in certain common heuristics alerts clinicians to their weaknesses as diagnosticians and should be beneficial to practice. Analysis of cases with missed diagnoses in teaching conferences might proceed along formal lines that identify the type of heuristic used and of inherent potential cognitive errors. Addressing these cognitive errors by becoming conscious of them is a useful tool in neurologic education and should facilitate a career-long process of continuous self-improvement. ANN NEUROL 2010;67:425,433 [source]