Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study Comparative Study
Comparing diagnostic performance and the utility of clinical vignette-based assessment under testing conditions designed to encourage either automatic or analytic thought.
Although decades of research have yielded considerable insight into physicians' clinical reasoning processes, assessing these processes remains challenging; thus, the authors sought to compare diagnostic performance and the utility of clinical vignette-based assessment under testing conditions designed to encourage either automatic or analytic thought. ⋯ Instructions to trust one's first impres-sions result in similar performance when compared with instructions to consider clinical information in a systematic fashion, but have greater utility when used for the purposes of assessment.