The difficulty with experience: does practice increase susceptibility to premature closure?

Introduction: A recent review of the physician performance literature concluded that the risk of prematurely closing one's diagnostic search increases with years of experience. To minimize confounding variables and gain insight into cognitive issues relevant to continuing education, the current study was performed to test this conclusion.

Methods: Physician participants were shown a series of case histories and asked to judge the probability of a pair of diagnoses.

How can I know what I don't know? Poor self assessment in a well-defined domain.

As the rapidity with which medical knowledge is generated and disseminated becomes amplified, an increasing emphasis has been placed on the need for physicians to develop the skills necessary for life-long learning. One such skill is the ability to evaluate one's own deficiencies. A ubiquitous finding in the study of self-assessment, however, is that self-ratings are poorly correlated with other performance measures.