ArticleFrontiers in psychology2015
Visual aids improve diagnostic inferences and metacognitive judgment calibration.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
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- The ESMO-Magnitude of Clinical Benefit Scale (ESMO-MCBS) visualisation: picturing the evidence of clinical benefit of clinical trial data.ESMO real world data and digital oncology · 2025Article
- Previous beliefs affect Bayesian reasoning in conditions fostering gist comprehension.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Psychological distress and health behaviours among Cambodian Americans at risk for developing diabetes.Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress · 2023Article
- Reference Dependence in Bayesian Reasoning: Value Selection Bias, Congruence Effects, and Response Prompt Sensitivity.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Internet-based Tailored Virtual Human Health Intervention to Promote Colorectal Cancer Screening: Design Guidelines from Two User Studies.Intelligent virtual agents : ... International Workshop, IVA ... proceedings. IVA (Conference) · 2021Article
- Public's understanding of swab test results for SARS-CoV-2: an online behavioural experiment during the April 2020 lockdown.BMJ open · 2021Article
- Tversky and Kahneman's Cognitive Illusions: Who Can Solve Them, and Why?Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- A New Visualization for Probabilistic Situations Containing Two Binary Events: The Frequency Net.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- From reading numbers to seeing ratios: a benefit of icons for risk comprehension.Psychological research · 2019Article
- Visualizing the Bayesian 2-test case: The effect of tree diagrams on medical decision making.PloS one · 2018Article
- Comprehension and computation in Bayesian problem solving.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Review
- Editorial: Improving Bayesian Reasoning: What Works and Why?Frontiers in psychology · 2015Article
- Effects of visualizing statistical information - an empirical study on tree diagrams and 2 × 2 tables.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Visual aids can improve comprehension of risks associated with medical treatments, screenings, and lifestyles. Do visual aids also help decision makers accurately assess their risk comprehension? That is, do visual aids help them become well calibrated? To address these questions, we investigated the benefits of visual aids displaying numerical information and measured accuracy of self-assessment of diagnostic inferences (i.e., metacognitive judgment calibration) controlling for individual differences in numeracy. Participants included 108 patients who made diagnostic inferences about three medical tests on the basis of information about the sensitivity and false-positive rate of the tests and disease prevalence. Half of the patients received the information in numbers without a visual aid, while the other half received numbers along with a grid representing the numerical information. In the numerical condition, many patients-especially those with low numeracy-misinterpreted the predictive value of the tests and profoundly overestimated the accuracy of their inferences. Metacognitive judgment calibration mediated the relationship between numeracy and accuracy of diagnostic inferences. In contrast, in the visual aid condition, patients at all levels of numeracy showed high-levels of inferential accuracy and metacognitive judgment calibration. Results indicate that accurate metacognitive assessment may explain the beneficial effects of visual aids and numeracy-a result that accords with theory suggesting that metacognition is an essential part of risk literacy. We conclude that well-designed risk communications can inform patients about healthrelevant numerical information while helping them assess the quality of their own risk comprehension.
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