Psychological cue use and Implications for a Clinical Decision Support System

This paper describes a new model of psychological classification that explains how people use cues to determine class or outcome likelihoods. The author proposes that clinicians respond to conditional probabilities of given cues & that these probabilities compete with each other for influence of classification. The model explains why people appear to respond to base rates inappropriately, thereby overestimating the occurrence of rare categories, & a clinical example is provided for predicting suicide risk. (47 refs) (SC)