Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Judgment”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 469 records · Page 26Linked to original sources
PubMed2003

Do humans optimally integrate stereo and texture information for judgments of surface slant?

An optimal linear system for integrating visual cues to 3D surface geometry weights cues in inverse proportion to their uncertainty. The problem of integrating texture and stereo information for judgments of planar surface slant provides a strong test of optimality in human perception. Since the accuracy of slant from texture judgments changes by an order of magnitude from low to high slants, optimality predicts corresponding changes in cue weights as a function of surface slant. Furthermore, since humans show significant individual differences in their abilities to use both texture and stereo information for judgments of 3D surface geometry, the problem admits the stronger test that individual differences in subjects' thresholds for discriminating slant from the individual cues should predict individual differences in cue weights. We tested both predictions by measuring slant discrimination thresholds and stereo/texture cue weights as a function of surface slant for multiple subjects. The results bear out both predictions of optimality, with the exception of an apparent slight under-weighting of texture information. This may be accounted for by factors specific to the stimuli used to isolate stereo information in the experiments. Taken together, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that humans optimally combine the two cues to surface slant, with cue weights proportional to the subjective reliability of the cues.

Cues↗
PubMed1991

Comparison of physician judgment and decision aids for ordering chest radiographs for pneumonia in outpatients.

STUDY OBJECTIVES: To compare physician judgment in the use of chest radiographs for diagnosing pneumonia with decision rules developed by Diehr, Singal, Heckerling, and Gennis. DESIGN: Propsective observational investigation with preradiograph survey of physicians' intent to order chest radiographs for patients presenting with respiratory complaints. All patients had uniform clinical data collected, including chest radiographs and sufficient information to retrospectively apply the four clinical prediction rules. SETTING: The emergency department and medical outpatient clinic of a major urban teaching hospital. PARTICIPANTS: Adult patients presenting with recent history of acute cough or exacerbation of chronic cough plus either fever, sputum production, or hemoptysis. RESULTS: Of 290 patients, 21 (7%) had pneumonia. The sensitivity of physician judgment (0.86) exceeded that of all four decision rules. The specificity of the Diehr (0.67), Heckerling (0.67), and Gennis (0.76) rules exceeded that of physician judgment (0.58). The accuracy of the Gennis (0.76) and Heckerling (0.68) rules also exceeded that of the physicians (0.60). DISCUSSION: Physicians' diagnostic and therapeutic decisions were characterized by high sensitivity but lower specificity for ordering chest radiographs to diagnose pneumonia. The higher specificity and accuracy of two of the decision rules suggest that they may have a role in patient evaluation.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Decision to hospitalize: objective diagnosis-related group criteria versus clinical judgment.

Three hundred fifty patients in an observation unit attached to an emergency department received diagnostic workup of nine critical diagnostic syndromes (abdominal pain, flank pain, headache, possible cerebrovascular accident, chest pain, dizziness or syncope, head injury, seizure, multiple trauma). The decision to hospitalize for acute care after observation for 11.1 +/- 3.9 hours was examined. The objective diagnosis-related group (DRG) criteria for admission were compared retrospectively with the physician's clinical judgment of need for hospitalization. Clinical outcome was used to establish the correctness of the decision to hospitalize. Clinical judgment was compared with objective DRG criteria for reliability in predicting the presence of serious pathology necessitating acute care hospitalization; respective values were sensitivity, 100% vs 76%; specificity, 86% vs 80%; positive predictive value, 75% vs 62%; and negative predictive value, 100% vs 89%. The difference between the sensitivity of the two admission criteria was highly significant (P less than 10(-8); chi 2, 26.12). We conclude that the physician's clinical judgment outperforms DRG objective criteria in identifying which patients with critical diagnostic syndromes need acute care hospitalization for emergency medical or surgical therapy.

Decision Making↗
PubMed2004

Judgments of laypersons and general practitioners on justifiability and legality of providing assistance to die to a terminally ill patient: a view from New Zealand.

As part of a larger study, four decisions related to a vignette scenario of the elective death of a terminally ill patient suffering intractable pain are examined (doctor supplying information and drugs, assisting patient to take the drugs, or administering a lethal injection). Judgments on justifiability and legality of actions were obtained from laypersons and general practitioners (GPs) in Auckland, New Zealand. The results show that over 72% of laypersons and over 30% of GPs judged all four actions justified. Despite illegality a significant number of laypersons and some doctors were unsure of the legal status of actions. The current law in New Zealand prohibiting physician-assisted death may not reflect judgments by the majority of laypersons or 30% of general practitioners on the justifiability of elective death options for a terminally ill patient with intractable pain. Judgments on justifiability may be related to confusion over the legality of actions.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Distributed and overlapping cerebral representations of number, size, and luminance during comparative judgments.

How are comparative judgments performed in the human brain? We scanned subjects with fMRI while they compared stimuli for size, luminance, or number. Regions involved in comparative judgments were identified using three criteria: task-related activation, presence of a distance effect, and interference of one dimension onto the other. We observed considerable overlap in the neural substrates of the three comparison tasks. Interestingly, the amount of overlap predicted the amount of cross-dimensional interference: in both behavior and fMRI, number interfered with size, and size with luminance, but number did not interfere with luminance. The results suggest that during comparative judgments, the relevant continuous quantities are represented in distributed and overlapping neural populations, with number and size engaging a common parietal spatial code, while size and luminance engage shared occipito-temporal perceptual representations.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Improving peer review: alternatives to unstructured judgments by a single reviewer.

BACKGROUND: Peer review, usually involving unstructured judgments by a single peer reviewing medical records, was the backbone of quality management in health care organizations until recent years. Although other approaches to quality management, such as continuous quality improvement, are now being widely adopted, peer review can still play a role in identifying dysfunctional organizational processes and individuals delivering poor care. Given the questionable reliability and validity of peer review as usually practiced, however, a more rigorous and thoughtful approach is needed-with consideration of issues such as the number of peers involved, the nature of their interaction while forming judgments, and the type of assessment instruments they use. MULTIPLE-REVIEWER PROCEDURES: Such procedures include the use of two or more reviewers making their assessments independently, discussion to consensus among reviewers, and committee review. STRUCTURED ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENTS: A number of studies suggest that instruments that carefully guide the reviewer have higher interrater reliability than less structured instruments. IDENTIFICATION OF SYSTEM ISSUES: The focus of peer review can be expanded beyond individual practitioner performance to include assessment of the operational environment in which the clinician functions. For example, one might ask whether any changes in hospital policies or procedures or in administrative or computerized support for clinicians might have improved the care received by a patient. CONCLUSION: The available data and the known limitations of unstructured judgments by a single reviewer justify serious consideration of multiple reviewer procedures and structured assessment instruments, particularly for reviews that have major consequences for patients and practitioners.

Humans↗
PubMed2000

Clinical judgment and clinical practice guidelines.

Clinicians make judgments under conditions of uncertainty. Decision research has shown that in uncertain situations individuals do not always act rationally, coherently, or to maximize their expected utility. Advocates of clinical guidelines believe that these guidelines will eliminate some of the cognitive biases that the practitioner may introduce into the medical decision-making process in an attempt to reduce its uncertainty. Other physicians have grave doubts about guidelines' application in practice. Guideline implementation lags well behind their development. Studies of practicing physicians and a survey of clinicians in one specialty and setting indicate that experienced clinicians may be implementing guidelines selectively. Many clinicians are concerned that guidelines are based on randomized trials and do not reflect the complexity of the real world, in which a decision's context and framework are important. Their reluctance also may be due to the difficulty of applying general guidelines to specific clinical situations. The problem will only increase in the future. The patients of the 21st century will be older and have more complex disease states. Physicians will have more patient-specific therapies and need to exercise more sophisticated clinical judgment. They may be more willing to use guidelines in making those judgments if research can demonstrate guidelines' effectiveness in improving decision making for individual patients.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2001

The influence of actuarial risk assessment in clinical judgments and tribunal decisions about mentally disordered offenders in maximum security.

Research has shown that actuarial assessments of violence risk are consistently more accurate than unaided judgments by clinicians, and it has been suggested that the availability of actuarial instruments will improve forensic decision making. This study examined clinical judgments and autonomous review tribunal decisions to detain forensic patients in maximum security. Variables included the availability of an actuarial risk report at the time of decision making, patient characteristics and history, and clinical presentation over the previous year. Detained and transferred patients did not differ in their actuarial risk of violent recidivism. The best predictor of tribunal decision was the senior clinician's testimony. There was also no significant association between the actuarial risk score and clinicians' opinions. Whether the actuarial report was available at the time of decision making did not alter the statistical model of either clinical judgments or tribunal decisions. Implications for the use of actuarial risk assessment in forensic decision making are discussed.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed2003

Hindsight bias in gustatory judgments.

Being in hindsight, people tend to overestimate what they had known in foresight. This phenomenon has been studied for a wide variety of knowledge domains (e.g., episodes with uncertain outcomes, or solutions to almanac questions). As a result of these studies, hindsight bias turned out to be a robust phenomenon. In this paper, we present two experiments that successfully extended the domain of hindsight bias to gustatory judgments. Participants tasted different food items and were asked to estimate the quantity of a certain ingredient, for example, the residual sugar in a white wine. Judgments in both experiments were systematically biased towards previously presented low or high values that were labeled as the true quantities. Thus, hindsight bias can be considered a phenomenon that extends well beyond the judgment domains studied so far.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

"God made me a girl": sex-category constancy judgments and explanations revisited.

To examine reasons for inconsistent findings in the development of sex-category constancy, children's constancy judgments and their accompanying explanations were studied over a 3-year period. Preschool, kindergarten, and 1st-grade children (N = 195) completed a sex-category constancy measure that elicited explanations and assessed constancy for the self and others across changes in gender-typed clothing, activities, and traits. Improvements in sex-category constancy performance were linked to explanations based on operational reasoning. Lower constancy scores were linked to explanations that emphasized gender role norms and external appearances. A separate analysis revealed that judgment-explanation relationships were stronger for questions about gender role changes in the self as opposed to others and for changes in gender-typed clothing as opposed to activities and traits. Findings suggest that the salience and personal relevance of gender role changes have important effects on children's sex-category constancy judgments and explanations.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

Considering the opposite: a corrective strategy for social judgment.

It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure--first noted by Francis Bacon--to consider possibilities at odds with beliefs and perceptions of the moment. Individuals who are induced to consider the opposite, therefore, should display less bias in social judgment. In two separate but conceptually parallel experiments, this reasoning was applied to two domains--biased assimilation of new evidence on social issues and biased hypothesis testing of personality impressions. Subjects were induced to consider the opposite in two ways: through explicit instructions to do so and through stimulus materials that made opposite possibilities more salient. In both experiments the induction of a consider-the-opposite strategy had greater corrective effect than more demand-laden alternative instructions to be as fair and unbiased as possible. The results are viewed as consistent with previous research on perseverance, hindsight, and logical problem solving, and are thought to suggest an effective method of retraining social judgment.

Attitude↗
PubMed1986

Trait memory and behavior memory: the effects of alternative pathways on impression judgment response times.

Carlston (1980a) and Lingle (1983) argued that remembered behaviors, previous trait inferences, or both may be accessed and used in making new trait inferences, depending on a variety of factors. In this article we relate this argument to a spreading activation model of memory and suggest factors that should affect the relative accessibility of inferences and behaviors during trait judgment processes. In our study we varied several of these factors and assessed accessibility, using response-time methods. The results of this study strongly support the model's prediction that prompting inference formation facilitates subsequent trait judgment response times, but only when relevant behavior memories have not been recently primed. We theorize that the inference manipulations used in this study strengthened the direct pathway to a relevant trait concept, but that the strength of this pathway was immaterial to judgment response times when a "proximal prime" directed retrieval efforts along an alternative "behavioral" route to the trait information. The results also suggest that the proximal behavior prime facilitated trait responses among subjects who had not been induced to make trait inferences, but slowed trait responses among subjects who had previously been induced to make trait inferences.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Mood, memory, and social judgments in children.

The influence of positive and negative moods on children's recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments was investigated in a two-list experimental design. A total of 161 schoolchildren, 8 to 10 years old, were presented with audiovisual information containing positive and negative details about 2 target children. Each presentation was preceded by happy or sad mood manipulations. One day later, the children were again placed in a happy or sad mood, and their recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments were assessed. Results showed that memory was better when (a) the children felt happy during encoding, retrieval, or both; (b) the material was incongruent with learning mood; (c) the 2 target characters were encountered in contrasting rather than in matching mood states; and (d) recall mood matched encoding mood. A happy mood increased the extremity of both positive and negative impression-formation judgments. Results are contrasted with experimental data obtained with normal or depressed adults, and implications are considered for contemporary theories of mood effects on cognition and for social-developmental research.

Child↗
PubMed1995

Implicit gender stereotyping in judgments of fame.

Implicit (unconscious) gender stereotyping in fame judgments was tested with an adaptation of a procedure developed by L. L. Jacoby, C. M. Kelley, J. Brown, and J. Jasechko (1989). In Experiments 1-4, participants pronounced 72 names of famous and nonfamous men and women, and 24 or 48 hr later made fame judgments in response to the 72 familiar and 72 unfamiliar famous and nonfamous names. These first experiments, in which signal detection analysis was used to assess implicit stereotypes, demonstrate that the gender bias (greater assignment of fame to male than female names) was located in the use of a lower criterion (beta) for judging fame of familiar male than female names. Experiments 3 and 4 also showed that explicit expressions of sexism or stereotypes were uncorrelated with the observed implicit gender bias in fame judgments.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Life events, relationship quality, and depression: an investigation of judgment discontinuity in vivo.

Relationships among stressful life events, negative affect, and judged quality of intimate relationships were explored. Three studies and a mini-meta-analysis revealed that as negative life events increased, judgments of close relationships gradually became less favorable, jumped back toward positivity, and then, again, gradually became less favorable. The same methods of analysis revealed a relationship between negative life events and negative affect with no evidence of significant discontinuities. Moreover, the correlation between relationship satisfaction and negative affect (with negative events held constant), was maximized at the point of relationship-judgment discontinuity. Although the findings are complex, they are consistent with the authors' theoretical account and represent an initial attempt to conceptualize the effect of negative life events in light of the recent social judgment literature.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Group entitativity and group perception: associations between physical features and psychological judgment.

Two experiments tested whether the perceived entitativity of groups (i.e., cohesiveness) influences judgments about those groups, in terms of both their observable physical properties and underlying psychological traits. Entitativity was manipulated with groups whose members were similar or dissimilar in skin color. Experiment 1 demonstrated that beliefs about entitativity elicited more accurate judgments of skin color for entitative than nonentitative social groups, although memory for individual members of entitative groups was relatively impoverished. Experiment 2 revealed that entitative groups were viewed as not only physically similar but also psychologically homogeneous and elicited strong negative trait and behavioral judgments. Together, these findings suggest that physical properties (e.g., similarity) can create perceptions of psychological "groupness" that have important consequences for group perception.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The "relative self": informational and judgmental consequences of comparative self-evaluation.

Results of 5 studies demonstrated that self-evaluative comparisons have 2 distinct informational consequences with opposing judgmental effects: They selectively increase the accessibility of standard-consistent self-knowledge and provide an evaluative reference point. The first informational consequence produces assimilation in self-evaluative judgments, whereas the latter yields contrast. Using a lexical decision task, Study 1 demonstrated that a social comparison selectively increases the accessibility of standard-consistent self-knowledge. Study 2 showed that this effect also holds for comparisons with objective standards. Studies 3 and 4 revealed that the same comparison may lead to assimilation on objective and contrast on subjective self-judgments. Finally, Study 5 demonstrated that assimilation results for comparisons with relevant and irrelevant standards, whereas contrast occurs only for relevant standards.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

The influence of metacontrast masking on detection and spatial-choice judgments: an apparent distinction between automatic and attentive response mechanisms.

Several studies of metacontrast masking in the 1960s apparently showed that the latency of simple detection responses was uninfluenced by the phenomenal dimming of the target induced by the mask. More recent studies using more suitable methodologies have clearly shown that such is not the case for situations in which the masking is a monotonically decreasing function of stimulus onset asynchrony. Experiment 1 investigated this issue for the situation in which masking is a U-shaped function of stimulus onset asynchrony. Contrary to the results obtained in monotonic masking situations, simple detection responses were not slowed by the masking. Experiment 2 demonstrated that although detection responses are not slowed in the U-shaped masking situation, spatial-choice judgments are. Experiments 3 and 4 indicated that this masking effect on spatial-choice reaction time is lost relatively rapidly with practice. However, changing the stimulus-response assignments reinstates the effect. The experiments suggest that for the situation in which U-shaped masking functions are obtained, responses that require attention (spatial-choice judgments early in practice or after stimulus-response relationships have been switched) are influenced by the metacontrast-induced phenomenal dimming, whereas responses that are automatic (i.e., detection responses; practiced spatial-choice judgments with consistent stimulus-response mappings) are not.

Adolescent↗