Memory for Patient Information as a Function of Experience in Mental Health

Abstract

Summary Mental health clinicians are tasked to diagnose and treat the millions of people worldwide seeking help for mental health issues. This paper investigates the memory clinicians have for patient information. We hypothesize that clinicians encapsulate mental health knowledge through experience into more abstract concepts, as in other domains changing what clinicians remember about patients compared with non-professionals. We tested memory for realistic patient–therapist interactions in experienced clinicians, intermediately trained graduate students, and laypeople. Clinicians recalled fewer facts than intermediate trainees and as many as laypeople. Furthermore, clinicians reported more abstracted information than all other participants, providing the first empirical demonstration of knowledge encapsulation in the memory of mental health clinicians. We discuss how our results fit into the existing literature on clinical expertise in mental health and the implications of our findings for future research relevant to mental health care.

Expertise in Clinical Psychology. The Effects of University Training and Practical Experience on Expertise in Clinical Psychology

“…However, if asked to do so, or when problems arise, experts are able to reflect lower-order concepts and their connections. Recently, Marsh and Ahn (2012) also found knowledge encapsulation in the memory of experienced mental health clinicians.…”

The influence of expertise on essence beliefs for mental and medical disorder categories

“…Experts also move beyond classifying things in their expertise domain at a surface level and instead classify those things at a more abstract level, such as sorting physics problems by their underlying principles (Chi et al, 1981). Overall this work demonstrates that experience in a domain changes the detailed nature of information held about categories in that domain (e.g., Johnson & Mervis, 1997;Marsh & Ahn, 2012;Tanaka & Taylor, 1991).…”

Pathways linking clinician demographics to mental health diagnostic accuracy: An international perspective

“…Among professional psychologists, there is a perception that through continuous education, training and clinical experience their clinical judgment accuracy will improve. Instead, research has shown that practitioners with more training and experience only perform marginally better than novices in making diagnostic decisions (Marsh & Ahn, ; Witteman & Tollenaar, ). Moreover, studies about clinicians with intermediate levels of experience revealed they tend to perform faster and worse than both novices and experienced clinicians (Witteman & Van den Bercken, ).…”

“…In addition, very few studies have reported specific demographic information about a heterogeneous sample of clinicians or used these data to explore mediating factors of diagnostic accuracy beyond decision‐making processes and patient characteristics. Previous findings—particularly about clinical expertize and clinician demographics—have been inconsistent, sometimes finding a lack of an effect or excluding the above factors from statistical analyses (Marsh & Ahn, ; Witteman & Tollenaar, ). We expect that the nature of the decision‐making process may interact with demographic factors to exert an influence on diagnostic accuracy.…”