Thinking Clearly about Performance

Thinking clearly about the endophenotype-intermediate phenotype-biomarker distinctions in developmental psychopathology research.

The endophenotype is central to modern developmental psychopathology studies. It is used in studies seeking to connect the genetic substrates of the panoply of major mental disorders with processes, tapped by laboratory and other assessment measures, in the genotype to a behavior/psychopathology pathway. Proposed originally by Gottesman and Shields (1972; Shields & Gottesman, 1973) 41 years ago...

Problems for clinical judgement: 3. Thinking clearly in an emergency.

The resuscitation of a patient in extremis is frequently characterized by chaos and disorganization, and is one of the most stressful situations in medicine. We reviewed selected studies from the fields of anesthesia, emergency medicine and critical care that address the process of responding to a critically ill patient. Individual clinicians can improve their performance by increased exposure ...

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'