In an experiment that used the inconsistency paradigm, experienced clinical psychologists
and psychology students performed a reading task using clinical reports and a diagnostic
judgment task. The clinical reports provided information about the symptoms of hypothetical
clients who had been previously diagnosed with a specific mental disorder. Reading times of
inconsistent target sentences were slower than that of control sentences, demonstrating an
inconsistency effect. The results also showed that experienced clinicians gave different
weights to different symptoms according to their relevance when fluently reading the clinical
reports provided, despite the fact that all the symptoms were of equal diagnostic value
according to the DSM-IV. The diagnostic judgment task yielded a similar pattern of results.
In contrast to previous findings, the results of the reading task may be taken as a direct
evidence of the intervention of reasoning processes that occur very early, rapidly, and online.
We suggest that these processes are based on the representation of mental disorders and that
these representations are particularly suited to fast retrieval from memory and to making
inferences. They may also be related to the clinician's causal reasoning. The implications of
these results for clinician training are also discussed.
