The influence of prior knowledge on the time course of clinical diagnosis inferences: A comparison of experts and novices

In 3 experiments, we tested how domain-related knowledge (in the clinical p sychology domain) influences clinical diagnosis inference generation during text comprehension. Clinical diagnoses are considered here as explanatory trait inferences. To analyze the time course of clinical diagnosis inferenc es, experts and novices were compared. In Experiment 1, 21 texts were prese nted in a lexical decision task using a stimulus onset asynchrony of 500 ms . Reaction times were faster for experts than novices. In Experiment 2, 8 t exts were presented using a reading time task with sentence-by-sentence pre sentation. Only in the case of the experts did we detect significant differ ences in reading times between the critical and the neutral sentences. In E xperiment 3, clinical and narrative texts were presented to analyze whether these differences between experts and novices were caused either by previo us knowledge or by general reading skills. The results showed advantages fo r experts, but only in the case of clinical texts. These results suggest th at clinical diagnosis inferences are made by the experts online and that pr evious knowledge is a decisive factor in this process.