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In making clinical judgements, it is argued that midwives use 'shortcuts' or heuristics based on estimated probabilities to simplify the decision-making task. Midwives (n = 30) were given simulated patient assessment situations of high and low complexity and were required to think aloud. Analysis of verbal protocols showed that subjective probability judgements (heuristics) were used more frequently in the high than low complexity case and predominated in the last quarter of the assessment period for the high complexity case. 'Representativeness' was identified more frequently in the high than in the low case, but was the dominant heuristic in both. Reports completed after each simulation suggest that heuristics based on memory for particular conditions affect decisions. It is concluded that midwives use heuristics, derived mainly from their clinical experiences, in an attempt to save cognitive effort and to facilitate reasonably accurate decisions in the decision-making process.

The performance of Chinese children in Beijing and Australian children in Sydney was compared on two types of facial expression task. Children of 4, 6, and 8 years of age were presented situation discrimination and situation inference/labeling tasks with both Chinese and Caucasian faces. Some evidence was obtained for an ethnic bias effect in emotion recognition from facial expressions. There was no indication that children from a collectivist culture are poorer at recognizing certain emotions than children from an individualistic society. Overall accuracy increased with age for children from both cultures, but the Chinese children were significantly more accurate than the Australians at all ages. These results are discussed in terms of the possible effects of different socialization practices, demographic factors, and suitability of the testing procedures for the two cultures.

The present study investigated the effect of self-reported vividness of visual imagery on the ability to discriminate between memories derived from two external sources of information. Subjects were shown a film of a crime and were then given a written description of the event which included information not seen in the film. In a source monitoring task, high and low imagers were found to be equally proficient in recognizing items as previously presented, but high imagers were poorer at discriminating the source of items based on the written description. This finding is considered in terms of possible encoding and retrieval differences resulting from imagery vividness. The role of vivid visual imagery as a variable underpinning confusions in eyewitness testimony is discussed.