Detecting fast, online reasoning processes in clinical decision making

In an experiment that used the inconsistency paradigm, experienced clinical psychologists and psychology students performed a reading task using clinical reports and a diagnostic judgment task. The clinical reports provided information about the symptoms of hypothetical clients who had been previously diagnosed with a specific mental disorder. Reading times of inconsistent target sentences were slower than those of control sentences, demonstrating an inconsistency effect. The results also showed that experienced clinicians gave different weights to different symptoms according to their relevance when fluently reading the clinical reports provided, despite the fact that all the symptoms were of equal diagnostic value according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text rev.; American Psychiatric Association, 2000). The diagnostic judgment task yielded a similar pattern of results. In contrast to previous findings, the results of the reading task may be taken as direct evidence of the intervention of reasoning processes that occur very early, rapidly, and online. We suggest that these processes are based on the representation of mental disorders and that these representations are particularly suited to fast retrieval from memory and to making inferences. They may also be related to the clinicians' causal reasoning. The implications of these results for clinician training are also discussed.