title: Recall by expert medical practitioners and novices as a record of processing attention.
abstract: Using recall of clinical protocols as a measure of expertise in medicine has yielded disappointingly small effects. Experiments using recall of clinical laboratory data are presented to provide an explanation. In one experiment, subjects either deliberately memorized or first diagnosed and then were incidentally asked for memory. With incidental instructions, experts recalled over twice as much data as did students, but with memorization instructions, student performance approximated that of experts. Experts also showed a large advantage over students in incidental recall of data that were not relevant to the problem solution. These results suggest that expert processing in this "discrete, independent inputs" domain requires effortful analysis with minimal reliance on default values, rather than relatively effortless pattern perception reported in highly visual areas of expertise. For this area, intentional memory is a misleading measure of expertise. However, incidental memory is a valuable measure of processing during diagnosis.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: G R
authors.initials: GR
authors.lastname: Norman
authors.forename: L R
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Brooks
authors.forename: S W
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Allen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001774:Blood Chemical Analysis; D002983:Clinical Competence; D004501:Education, Medical; D006801:Humans; D008499:Medical Records; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D012016:Reference Values; D014556:Urine / Q000032:analysis