Premature conclusions in diagnostic reasoning

President's message: reasoning behind conclusions in psychiatric reports and testimony.

Diagnostic Modalities in Premature Rupture of Membranes

Premature Rupture of Membranes (PROM) is defined as rupture of membranes prior to onset of labor. It can occur at any gestational week. PROM greater than 24 hours is referred as prolonged PROM and carries risk of ascending infection (1). PROM occurs in 8%-10% of all term pregnancies and in 2%-4% of all preterm singleton pregnancies (1,2). The most important maternal risk is intrauterine infecti...

Memory Activation in Diagnostic Reasoning

In the field of diagnostic reasoning, it has been argued that memory activation can provide the reasoner with a subset of possible explanations from memory that is highly adaptive for the task at hand. However, few studies have experimentally tested this assumption. Even less empirical and theoretical work has investigated how newly incoming observations affect the availability of explanations ...

Examining fallacies in diagnostic reasoning.

The paper by Gurova takes issue with the claim of Meehl that ‘understanding makes it normal’ is a fallacy in diagnostic reasoning [1,2]. Her paper prompts the more general question of appropriate methods for testing whether a specific way of reasoning in making a clinical diagnosis is fallacious. So prompted, I will compare the methods that the Gurova paper deploys with some of requirements for...

Classification as diagnostic reasoning.

An ongoing goal in the field of categorization has been to determine how objects' features provide evidence of membership in one category versus another. Well-known findings include that feature diagnosticity is a function of how often the feature appears in category members versus nonmembers, their perceptual salience, how features are used in support of inferences, and how observable features...