Imagining what might be: why children underestimate uncertainty.

Children's well-documented tendency to behave as if they know more than they do about uncertain events is reduced under two conditions: when the outcome of a chance event has yet to be determined and when one unknown outcome has occurred but is difficult to imagine. In Experiment 1, in line with published findings, 5- and 6-year-olds (N=61) preferred to guess the unknown location of a known object when the object was in place rather than before its location had been determined. There was no such preference when the object's identity was unknown.

Agency affects adults', but not children's, guessing preferences in a game of chance.

Adults and children have recently been shown to prefer guessing the outcome of a die roll after the die has been rolled (but remained out of sight) rather than before it has been rolled. This result is contrary to the predictions of the competence hypothesis (Heath & Tversky, 1991 ), which proposes that people are sensitive to the degree of their relative ignorance and therefore prefer to guess about an outcome it is impossible to know, rather than one that they could know, but do not. We investigated the potential role of agency in guessing preferences about a novel game of chance.

Effects of documentation-based decision support on chronic disease management.

Objective: To evaluate whether a new documentation-based clinical decision support system (CDSS) is effective in addressing deficiencies in the care of patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) and diabetes mellitus (DM).

Study Design: Controlled trial randomized by physician.

Methods: We assigned primary care physicians (PCPs) in 10 ambulatory practices to usual care or the CAD/DM Smart Form for 9 months.

Scales for assessing self-efficacy of nurses and assistants for preventing falls.

Aim: This paper is a report of the development and testing of the Self-Efficacy for Preventing Falls Nurse and Assistant scales.

Background: Patient falls and fall-related injuries are traumatic ordeals for patients, family members and providers, and carry a toll for hospitals. Self-efficacy is an important factor in determining actions persons take and levels of performance they achieve.

Complementary methods of system usability evaluation: surveys and observations during software design and development cycles.

Poor usability of clinical information systems delays their adoption by clinicians and limits potential improvements to the efficiency and safety of care. Recurring usability evaluations are therefore, integral to the system design process. We compared four methods employed during the development of outpatient clinical documentation software: clinician email response, online survey, observations and interviews.

Improving management of chronic diseases with documentation-based clinical decision support: results of a pilot study.

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) have the potential to improve patient care. We developed the Coronary Artery Disease and Diabetes Mellitus (CAD/DM) Smart Form as a documentation-based application that provides decision support for the management of chronic diseases. Results of a pilot study suggest that the CAD/DM Smart Form has the potential to improve patient care.

Searching and planning: young children's reasoning about past and future event sequences.

Six experiments examined children's ability to make inferences using temporal order information. Children completed versions of a task involving a toy zoo; one version required reasoning about past events (search task) and the other required reasoning about future events (planning task). Children younger than 5 years failed both the search and the planning tasks, whereas 5-year-olds passed both (Experiments 1 and 2).