Over the course of training, physicians develop significant knowledge and expertise. We review dual-process theory, the dominant theory in explaining medical decision making: physicians use both heuristics from accumulated experience (System 1) and logical deduction (System 2). We then discuss how the accumulation of System 1 clinical experience…

We investigated the effect of expertise on the wisdom of crowds. Participants completed 60 trials of a numerical estimation task, during which they saw 50-100 asterisks and were asked to estimate how many stars they had just seen. Experiment 1 established that both inner- and outer-crowd wisdom extended to our novel task: Single responses alone…

Although tests and assessments--such as those used to maintain a physician's Board certification--are often viewed merely as tools for decision-making about one's performance level, strong evidence now indicates that the experience of being tested is a powerful learning experience in its own right: The act of retrieving targeted information from…

Until recently, physicians in the USA who were board-certified in a specialty needed to take a summative test every 6-10 years. However, the 24 Member Boards of the American Board of Medical Specialties are in the process of switching toward much more frequent assessments, which we refer to as "longitudinal assessment." The goal of…