The Importance of Cognitive Errors in Diagnosis and Strategies to Minimize Them.¶
Croskerry, P. (2003). The Importance of Cognitive Errors in Diagnosis and Strategies to Minimize Them. Academic Medicine, 78(8), 775-780.
Cited by¶
7 citations across 7 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Cognitive Entrenchment
This sourceCatalogs diagnostic cognitive biases including premature closure (stopping search after the first plausible hypothesis).
- Emotional Reasoning
- Over-testing then produces findings (false positives, incidental abnormalities) that appear to validate the original emotional inference.
This sourceCognitive-error framework in medical diagnosis; emotional reasoning in diagnostic over-testing.
- Over-testing then produces findings (false positives, incidental abnormalities) that appear to validate the original emotional inference.
- Law of the Instrument
- Diagnostic medicine and statistics: the cardiologist, gastroenterologist, and neurologist see heart, GI, and nervous-system problems in one chest-pain patient, and the Bayesian, frequentist, and ML practitioner see prior-choice, test-construction, and feature-engineering problems in one dataset.
This sourceCatalogs diagnostic cognitive dispositions including anchoring and specialty-driven framing, whereby a clinician's repertoire shapes which diagnosis a presentation (e.g., chest pain) is read as — supporting the cardiologist/gastroenterologist/neurologist specialty-bias instance.
- Diagnostic medicine and statistics: the cardiologist, gastroenterologist, and neurologist see heart, GI, and nervous-system problems in one chest-pain patient, and the Bayesian, frequentist, and ML practitioner see prior-choice, test-construction, and feature-engineering problems in one dataset.
- Metacognition
- A clinical radiologist reviewing chest X-rays for signs of cancer.
This sourceCatalogues cognitive dispositions to respond and diagnostic-error patterns in clinical practice; documents how working-memory load and attentional fragmentation jointly elevate diagnostic-error rates.
- A clinical radiologist reviewing chest X-rays for signs of cancer.
Mechanisms¶
- Diagnostic Logic Check
- Its failure mode is premature closure
This sourceDefines premature closure as accepting a diagnosis and ending consideration of reasonable alternatives before the diagnosis is fully verified.
- Its failure mode is premature closure
- Diagnostic Narrowing
- Its signature failure is premature closure
This sourceDescribes diagnostic premature closure as anchoring early, favoring confirming information, and stopping before a diagnosis is fully verified.
- Its signature failure is premature closure
- Differential Diagnosis List
- Its failure modes are the classic diagnostic-error pair. Anchoring fixes attention on the first or most vivid entry, and premature closure declares that entry the winner before the rest of the field is truly excluded — the single most common route to a missed diagnosis.
This sourceDefines anchoring as early fixation on salient initial features and premature closure as accepting a diagnosis before full verification.
- Its failure modes are the classic diagnostic-error pair. Anchoring fixes attention on the first or most vivid entry, and premature closure declares that entry the winner before the rest of the field is truly excluded — the single most common route to a missed diagnosis.
Verification¶
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