Title: A Fuzzy Trace Theory of Medical Decision Making. 


Valerie Reyna, PhD

Dept of Surgery, Education

University of Arizona, Tucson

vreyna@u.arizona.edu

 

American Psychological Annual Meetings, San Francisco, August 26, 2001.

 

The theory of fuzzy traces assumes that during an experience, both verbatim and gist representations are formed. These representations are encoded, stored, and retrieved independently. Applied to the knowledge applied in practice by physicians, we might assume that the gist representation may be involved in the recognition of disease presentations, while the verbatim representation may be activated by questions, by the need to explain to patients or to students, or by the need to document the encounter. Evidence from a variety of studies supporting the existence of the two types of representations is presented. 

 

 

 

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