Are risk assessment tools more accurate than unstructured judgments in predicting violent, any, and sexual offending? A meta-analysis of direct comparison studies.

We conducted a pre-registered meta-analysis of studies that directly compared the predictive validity of risk assessment tools to unstructured judgments of risk for violent, any, or sexual offending. A total of 31 studies, containing 169 effect sizes from 45,673 risk judgments, met inclusion criteria. Based on the results of three-level mixed-effects meta-regression models, the predictive validity of total scores on risk assessment tools was significantly higher than that of unstructured judgments for predictions of violent, any, and sexual offending. Tools continued to outperform unstructured judgments after accounting for risk of bias. This finding was also robust to variations in population, assessment context, and outcome measurement. Although this meta-analysis provides support for the use of risk assessment tools, it also highlights limitations and gaps that future research should address.

People judge others more harshly after talking to bots.

People now commonly interact with Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents. How do these interactions shape how humans perceive each other? In two preregistered studies (total N = 1,261), we show that people evaluate other humans more harshly after interacting with an AI (compared with an unrelated purported human). In Study 1, participants who worked on a creative task with AIs (versus purported humans) subsequently rated another purported human's work more negatively. Study 2 replicated this effect and demonstrated that the results hold even when participants believed their evaluation would not be shared with the purported human. Exploratory analyses of participants' conversations show that prior to their human evaluations they were more demanding, more instrumental and displayed less positive affect towards AIs (versus purported humans). These findings point to a potentially worrisome side effect of the exponential rise in human-AI interactions.

Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: Children Appreciate Reasoners Who Approach Moral Dilemmas With Humility.

Moral decisions often involve dilemmas: cases of conflict between competing obligations. In two studies (N = 204), we ask whether children appreciate that reasoning through dilemmas involves acknowledging that there is no single, simple solution. In Study 1, 5- to 8-year-old US children were randomly assigned to a Moral Dilemma condition, in which story characters face dilemmas between two prosocial actions, or a Personal Cost control, in which story characters face decisions between a matched prosocial action and a self-interested action. Children were then presented with two reasoners who made the same judgment, but one confidently endorsed one moral action, and the other hesitantly acknowledged both actions. As they aged, children became more likely to prefer the uncertain reasoner's "way of thinking" in the Moral Dilemma compared to the Personal Cost condition. They also inferred that the uncertain reasoner was nicer and more trustworthy than the confident one. In Study 2, when both reasoners acknowledged the dilemma and differed only in their level of uncertainty, 5-year-olds preferred the acknowledgment to be accompanied by a confident decision, 6- and 7-year-olds preferred it be accompanied by uncertainty, and 8-year-olds showed no preference. These results show that, before the age at which children can resolve dilemmas successfully on their own, they recognize and value others who approach dilemmas with appropriate humility.

Clinical Judgment Item Development for Emergency Medical Service Clinicians.

OBJECTIVES: While clinical judgment is vital for all clinicians, it is not clearly assessed in initial or continuing emergency medical services (EMS) education due to unclear definitions. Recently, clarity of this concept has been provided through the development of a theoretical framework for clinical judgment in EMS that considers the broad and evolving nature of prehospital care delivery. METHODS: To facilitate standardization of clinical judgment assessments, in this educational practice review we present a template for item development leveraging the new framework. Developed with input from EMS clinicians, educators, and expertise from the nursing field with experience in clinical judgment item development, this template can be used to support item generation for a specific event phase (e.g., en route, scene, and post scene) in a clinical scenario. RESULTS: We provide a transparent and reproducible template for item generation for clinical judgment assessments evaluating the six basic cognitive reasoning steps of recognizing cues, analyzing cues, defining a hypothesis, generating solutions, taking action, and evaluating the outcomes of those actions. CONCLUSIONS: This template allows for generation of items for each EMS event phase that can be repeated serially for any combination of prehospital clinical situations.

Veracity Judgments Based on Complications: A Training Experiment.

Research has shown that complications are more common in truth tellers' accounts than in lie tellers' accounts, but there is currently no experiment that has examined the accuracy of observers' veracity judgments when looking at complications. A total of 87 participants were asked to judge 10 transcripts (five truthful and five false) derived from a set of 59 transcripts generated in a previous experiment by Deeb et al. Approximately half of the participants were trained to detect complications (Trained), and the other half did not receive training (Untrained). Trained participants were more likely to look for complications, but they did not detect them accurately, and thus their veracity judgments did not improve beyond Untrained participants' judgments. We discuss that the training may have been too brief or not sensitive enough to enhance decision-making.

Punishment after Life: How Attitudes about Longer-than-Life Sentences Expose the Rules of Retribution.

Prison sentences that exceed the natural lifespan present a puzzle because they have no more power to deter or incapacitate than a single life sentence. In three survey experiments, we tested the extent to which participants support these longer-than-life sentences under different decision contexts. In Experiment 1, 130 undergraduates made hypothetical prison sentence-length recommendations for a serious criminal offender, warranting two sentences to be served either concurrently or consecutively. Using a nationally representative sample (N = 182) and an undergraduate pilot sample (N = 260), participants in Experiments 2 and 3 voted on a hypothetical ballot measure to either allow or prohibit the use of consecutive life sentences. Results from all experiments revealed that, compared to concurrent life sentences participants supported the use of consecutive life sentences for serious offenders. In addition, they adjusted these posthumous years in response to mitigating factors in a manner that was indistinguishable from ordinary sentences (Experiment 1), and their support for consecutive life sentencing policies persisted, regardless of the default choice and whether the policy was costly to implement (Experiments 2 and 3). These judgment patterns were most consistent with retributive punishment heuristics and have implications for sentencing policy and for theories of punishment behavior.

A Uniform Approach for Advancing Athlete Assessment: A Tutorial on the Lens Model.

In athlete assessment, coaches or scouts typically judge athletes by observing and combining information about their attributes. However, how accurate is the expert's eye in combining this information, and can its accuracy be improved? To address these questions, this paper introduces the Lens Model, a framework for studying human judgment that has been widely successful in other performance domains. Since the framework offers both theoretical and practical benefits and is new to sports scientists and practitioners, our paper is presented in the form of a tutorial. First, we discuss the need for the Lens Model in sports; second, we demonstrate its proven value outside of sports. Third, we provide a conceptual explanation of the Lens Model, detailing, among other aspects, how experts' judgmental policies can be modeled and how judgmental accuracy can be determined and evaluated. This is followed by an empirical example: a study on the judgments of soccer scouts, along with suggestions to improve their accuracy. To inspire further Lens Model research across sports, we conclude with prospective research directions.

Dress Code Monitoring Method in Industrial Scene Based on Improved YOLOv8n and DeepSORT.

Deep learning-based object detection has become a powerful tool in dress code monitoring. However, even state-of-the-art detection models inevitably suffer from false alarms or missed detections, especially when handling small targets such as hats and masks. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel method for dress code monitoring using an improved YOLOv8n model, the DeepSORT tracking, and a new dress code judgment criterion. We improve the YOLOv8n model through three means: (1) a new neck structure named FPN-PAN-FPN (FPF) is introduced to enhance the model's feature fusion capability, (2) Receptive-Field Attention convolutional operation (RFAConv) is utilized to better capture the difference in information brought by different positions, and a (3) Focused Linear Attention (FLatten) mechanism is added to expand the model's receptive field. This improved YOLOv8n model increases mAP while reducing model size. Next, DeepSORT is integrated to obtain instance information across multi-frames. Finally, we adopt a new judgment criterion to conduct real-scene dress code monitoring. The experimental results show that our method effectively identifies instances of dress violations, reduces false alarms, and improves accuracy.

Increased reliance on heuristic thinking in mild cognitive impairment.

Reasoning can be fast, automatic, and intuitive or slow, deliberate, and analytical. Use of one cognitive reasoning style over the other has broad implications for beliefs, but differences in cognitive style have not previously been reported in those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Here, the cognitive reflection test is used to measure cognitive style in healthy older adults and those with MCI. Those with MCI performed worse than cognitively healthy older adults, indicating they are more likely to engage in intuitive thinking than age-matched adults. This association is reliable after controlling for additional cognitive, self-report, and demographic factors. Across all measures, subjective cognitive decline was the best predictor of cognitive status. A difference in cognitive style represents a novel behavioral marker of MCI, and future work should explore whether this explains a broader pattern of reasoning errors in those with MCI, such as susceptibility to scams or impaired financial reasoning.

The Use of Art to Develop Holistic Nurses and Clinical Judgment: An Educational Intervention.

Background: Artwork can be used to practice the development of holistic care for nursing students. This activity was designed for senior nursing students to develop their holistic nursing skills through a series of in-class activities while viewing Frida Kahlo's The Broken Column. Aim: This study's aim was to design an educational experience to develop a more holistic approach to caring for patients for nursing students. Method: Students submitted their initial impressions of the painting via an anonymous quiz. After a guided Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) session, students submitted impressions of the artwork. A VTS facilitator read a history of an accident which revealed the cause of Kahlo's medical and emotional pain. Students then wrote about their perceptions of the painting's meaning and how they might use VTS in caring for their patients. Answers were analyzed using Braun and Clark's thematic analysis. Results: The themes identified were emotions and feelings, metaphor, life/story, and listening to inform perspective. Most found that VTS changed their impressions and enhanced their ability to question patients and inform their care. Conclusion: Students found that VTS expanded their view of patient care and helped them see the patient more holistically, aligning with the development of clinical judgment.

Metajudgment: Metatheories and Beliefs About Good Judgment Across Societies.

We introduce the concept of "metajudgment" to provide a framework for understanding folk standards people use to navigate everyday decisions. Defined as a set of metatheories and beliefs about different types of judgment, metajudgment serves as the guiding principle behind the selection and application of reasoning strategies in various contexts. We review emerging studies on metajudgment to identify common dimensions, such as intuition versus deliberative reasoning and rationality versus reasonableness. These dimensions are examined across multiple societies. The reviewed findings illuminate an apparent paradox: Universal adaptive challenges produce largely consistent folk standards of judgment across cultures, whereas situational demands drive systematic within-person variability. Metajudgment offers a comprehensive framework for understanding diverse reasoning patterns in individual and cross-cultural contexts, calling for greater attention to the ecologically sensitive study of within-person judgmental variability.

Experts' prediction of item difficulty of multiple-choice questions in the Ethiopian Undergraduate Medicine Licensure Examination.

BACKGROUND: The ability of an expert's item difficulty ratings to predict test-taker actual performance is an important aspect of licensure examinations. Expert judgment is used as a primary source of information for users to make prior decisions to determine the pass rate of test takers. The nature of raters involved in predicting item difficulty is central to set credible standards. Therefore, this study aimed to assess and compare raters' prediction and actual Multiple-Choice Questions' difficulty of the undergraduate medicine licensure examination (UGMLE) in Ethiopia. METHOD: 815 examinees' responses to 200 Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) were used in this study. The study also included experts' item difficulty ratings of seven physicians who participated in the standard settings of UGMLE. Then, analysis was conducted to understand experts' rating variation in predicting the actual difficulty levels of examinees. Descriptive statistics was used to profile the mean rater's and actual difficulty value for MCQs, and ANOVA was used to compare the mean differences between raters' prediction of item difficulty. Additionally, regression analysis was used to understand the interrater variations in item difficulty predictions compared to the actual difficulty. The proportion of variance of actual difficulty explained from rater prediction was computed using regression analysis. RESULTS: In this study, the mean difference between raters' prediction and examinees' actual performance was inconsistent across the exam domains. The study revealed a statistically significant strong positive correlation between the actual and predicted item difficulty in exam domains eight and eleven. However, a non-statistically significant very weak positive correlation was reported in exam domains seven and twelve. The multiple comparison analysis showed significant differences in mean item difficulty ratings between raters. In the regression analysis, experts' item difficulty ratings of the UGMLE had 33% power in predicting the actual difficulty level. The regression model also showed a moderate positive correlation (R = 0.57) that was statistically significant at F (6, 193) = 15.58, P = 0.001. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrated the complex process for assessing the difficulty level of MCQs in the UGMLE and emphasized the benefits of using experts' ratings in advance. To ensure the exams maintain the necessary reliable and valid scores, raters' accuracy on the UGMLE must be improved. To achieve this, techniques that align with the evolving assessment methodologies must be developed.

Nonparametric estimation of mean residual lifetime in ranked set sampling with a concomitant variable.

The mean residual lifetime (MRL) of a unit is its expected additional lifetime provided that it has survived until time t. The MRL estimation problem has been frequently addressed in the literature since it has wide applications in statistics, reliability and survival analysis. In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the MRL in ranked set sampling when actual quantifications of a concomitant variable are available. To exploit the additional information of the concomitant variable, we introduce several MRL estimators based on some regression techniques. We then compare them with the standard MRL estimator in simple random sampling using Monte Carlo simulation and a real dataset from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program. Our results indicate the superiority of the procedures that we have developed when the quality of ranking is fairly good.

Investigating clinical decision-making in bleeding complications among nursing students: A longitudinal mixed-methods study.

AIM: To describe undergraduate nursing students' clinical decision-making in post-procedural bleeding scenarios and explore the changes from the first to the final year of their program. BACKGROUND: Bleeding is a common complication following invasive procedures and its effective management requires nurses to develop strong clinical decision-making competencies. Although nursing education programs typically address bleeding complications, there is a gap in understanding how nursing students make clinical decisions regarding these scenarios. Additionally, little is known about how their approach to bleeding management evolves over the course of their education. DESIGN: Longitudinal mixed-methods study based on the Recognition-Primed Decision Model. METHODS: A total of 59 undergraduate students recorded their responses to two clinical decision-making vignettes depicting patients with signs of bleeding post-hip surgery (first year) and cardiac catheterization (final year). Their responses were analyzed using content analysis. The resulting categories capture the cues students noticed, the goals they aimed to achieve, the actions they proposed and their expectations for how the bleeding situations might unfold. Code frequencies showing the most variation between the first and final years were analyzed to explore changes in students' clinical decision-making. RESULTS: Nearly all students focused on two primary categories: 'Bleeding' and 'Instability and Shock.' Fewer students addressed six secondary categories: 'Stress and Concern,' 'Pain,' 'Lifestyle and Social History,' 'Wound Infection,' 'Arrhythmia,' and 'Generalities in Surgery.' Students often concentrated on actions to manage bleeding without further assessing its causes. Changes from the first to the final year included a more focused assessment of instability and shifts in preferred actions. CONCLUSIONS: This study reveals that nursing students often prioritize immediate actions to stop bleeding while sometimes overlooking the assessment of underlying causes or broader care goals. It suggests that concept-based learning and reflection on long-term outcomes could improve clinical decision-making in post-procedural care.

Effects of personality traits and mood induction on metamemory judgments and metacognitive beliefs.

Although the effects of mood and personality traits on memory performance have previously been studied, their relationship to the metamemory and metacognitive processes is still unknown. In this study, we investigated the effects of mood induction (positive and negative) and personality traits (extroverted and neurotics) on metacognitive beliefs, memory confidence, the judgment of learning (JOL) and feeling of knowing (FOK) judgments during face-name recognition tasks. One hundred twenty-seven participants who met the criteria based on their extraverted and neurotic personality scores on the Big Five Personality Inventory were randomly assigned to positive and negative mood induction conditions. We found that neurotics showed lower JOL judgments and accuracy than extroverts. The interaction effect between mood and personality significantly affected JOL and FOK accuracy, indicating that while extraverts were more accurate during positive induction, neurotics were more accurate during negative induction. In addition, neurotics were underconfident in their memory and reported more negative metacognitive beliefs than extroverts. We concluded that memory and metamemory processes are distinguishable in their relationships with mood states and personality traits. Our data also showed that JOL and FOK are distinct processes that support domain-specific metacognitive judgments.

Single session and repeated anodal transcranial direct current stimulation over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex increases reflective thinking but not working memory updating performance.

Background: Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has shown to have effects on different domains of cognition yet there is a gap in the literature regarding effects on reflective thinking performance. Objective: The current study investigated if single session and repeated anodal tDCS over the right DLPFC induces effects on judgment and decision-making performance and whether these are linked to working memory (updating) performance or cognitive inhibition. Methods: Participants received anodal tDCS over the right DLPFC once (plus sham tDCS in a second session) or twice (24 h apart). In the third group participants received a single session of sham stimulation only. Cognitive characteristic measures were administered pre-stimulation (thinking disposition, impulsivity, cognitive ability). Experimental tasks included two versions of the Cognitive Reflection Test (numeric vs verbal-CRT), a set of incongruent base-rate vignettes, and two working memory tests (Sternberg task and n-back task). Forty-eight participants (mean age = 26.08 ± 0.54 years; 27 females) were recruited. Results: Single sessions of tDCS were associated with an increase in reflective thinking performance compared to the sham conditions, with stimulation improving scores on incongruent base rate tasks as well as marginally improving numeric CRT scores (compared to sham), but not thinking tasks without a numeric component (verbal-CRT). Repeated anodal stimulation only improved numeric CRT scores. tDCS did not increase working memory (updating) performance. These findings could not be explained by a practice effect or a priori differences in cognitive characteristics or impulsivity across the experimental groups. Conclusion: The current results demonstrate the involvement of the right DLPFC in reflective thinking performance which cannot be explained by working memory (updating) performance or general cognitive characteristics of participants.

Nurses' perception of uncertainty in clinical decision-making: A qualitative study.

Background: Uncertainty is a common challenge for nurses in clinical decision-making, which can compromise patient care quality and safety. To address this issue, it is essential to understand how nurses perceive and cope with uncertainty in their practice. Aim: This study aimed to explore nurses' perceptions of uncertainty in clinical decision-making using a qualitative approach. Methods: This study was conducted with a qualitative approach and conventional content analysis in 2020. Participants consisted of 17 nurses from different wards of teaching hospitals in Northwestern Iran, recruited using the purposive sampling method. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed simultaneously with data collection (June to December 2020). The data were analyzed using the content analysis approach suggested by Wildemuth. Data were managed with MAXQDA10 software. The analysis revealed four main themes and ten subthemes that described the nurses' experiences of uncertainty in clinical decision-making. Results: The main themes were: difficult choice, difficult situation, insufficient judgment, and emotional burden. Conclusions: The study participants defined uncertainty in clinical decision-making as a difficult choice that occurs in difficult situations, which influenced their clinical judgment and emotional well-being. These findings provide valuable insights for developing interventions to help nurses manage uncertainty and improve their decision-making skills and safety.

Beliefs and experiences of educators when involved in the design of a Learning-by-concordance tool: A qualitative interpretative study.

BACKGROUND: Based on the involvement of qualified educators in its design, the Learning-by-Concordance tool aims to promote the learning of reasoning in contexts of uncertainty. However, data are still scarce on the experience of educators in terms of sharing and exposing their reasoning processes using this tool. PURPOSE: This study sought to explore the beliefs and experiences of educators when involved in the design of a Learning-by-Concordance tool. METHOD: This research used a descriptive qualitative design. Four dialogue groups were conducted with educators with different roles and responsibilities while designing a Learning-by-Concordance tool. A descriptive interpretative analysis of educators' verbatim quotes was done. FINDINGS: A total of 14 participants took part in the study. The results show the discomfort of educators despite their recognized expertise. Three themes emerged: 1- the need to be reassured by the opinions of colleagues; 2-feeling like impostors; and 3- concerns for the quality of instructional supports. CONCLUSIONS: The role taken by educators for teaching reasoning in contexts of uncertainty is to draw on practical experience where different types of knowledge intersect and are mobilized, to overcome feelings of insecurity, and to engage in close and authentic conversation with learners.

Independent-channels models of temporal-order judgment revisited: A model comparison.

The perception of temporal order or simultaneity of stimuli is almost always explained in terms of independent-channels models, such as perceptual-moment, triggered-moment, and attention-switching models. Independent-channels models generally posit that stimuli are processed in separate peripheral channels and that their arrival-time difference at a central location is translated into an internal state of order (simultaneity) if it reaches (misses) a certain threshold. Non-monotonic and non-parallel psychometric functions in a ternary-response task provided critical evidence against a wide range of independent-channels models. However, two independent-channels models have been introduced in the last decades that can account for such shapes by considering misreports of internal states (response-error model) or by assuming that simultaneity and order judgments rely on distinct sensory and decisional processes (two-stage model). Based on previous ideas, we also consider a two-threshold model, according to which the same arrival-time difference may need to reach a higher threshold for order detection than for successiveness detection. All three models were fitted to various data sets collected over a period of more than a century. The two-threshold model provided the best balance between goodness of fit and parsimony. This preference for the two-threshold model over the two-stage model and the response-error model aligns well with several lines of evidence from cognitive modeling, psychophysics, mental chronometry, and psychophysiology. We conclude that the seemingly deviant shapes of psychometric functions can be explained within the framework of independent-channels models in a simpler way than previously assumed.

Children's ability to estimate approaching vehicle time-to-arrival following training in a virtual pedestrian environment.

OBJECTIVES: Child pedestrian injuries represent a significant public health challenge. Understanding the most complex cognitive skills required to cross streets helps us understand, improve, and protect children in traffic, as underdeveloped cognitive skill likely impacts children's pedestrian safety. One complex component of street-crossing is the cognitive-perceptual task of judging time-to-arrival of oncoming traffic. We examined capacity of 7- and 8-year-olds to judge time-to-arrival for vehicles approaching from varying distances and speeds, as well as improvement in those judgments following intensive street-crossing training in a virtual reality (VR) pedestrian simulator. METHODS: 500 seven- and eight-year-olds participated in a randomized trial evaluating use of a large kiosk VR versus smartphone-based VR headset to teach street-crossing skills. Prior to randomization into VR training condition and also prior to initiation of any training, children engaged in a video-based vehicle approach estimation task to assess ability to judge traffic time-to-arrival. They then engaged in multiple VR-based pedestrian safety training sessions in their randomly assigned condition until achieving adult functioning. Soon after training and again 6 months later, children repeated the vehicle estimation task. RESULTS: Prior to randomization or training, children were more accurate judging time to arrival for closer versus farther traffic, and rapidly-moving versus slower-moving traffic, but those results were subsumed by a speed x distance interaction. The interaction suggested distance cues were used more prominently than speed cues, and speed had varying effects at different distances. Training group had minimal effect on learning and all children became significantly better at judging vehicle arrival times following training. CONCLUSIONS: Children tend to underestimate vehicle arrival times. Distance cues are more impactful on time-to-arrival judgments than speed cues, but children's estimations based both on manipulations of vehicle speed and manipulations of vehicle distance improved post-training. Improvements were retained six months later. This finding is consistent with psychophysics research suggesting vehicle approach judgments rely on optical size and looming, which are impacted both by vehicle speeds and distances. Implementation of VR-based training for child pedestrian safety is recommended, as it may improve children's judgment of vehicle time-to-arrival, but it must be conducted cautiously to avoid iatrogenic effects.