Intuitive and deliberative approaches for diagnosing ‘well’ versus ‘unwell’: evidence from eye tracking, and potential implications for training

Rapidly assessing how ill a patient is based on their immediate presentation—colloquially termed ‘eyeballing’ in practice—serves a vital role in acute care settings. Yet surprisingly little is known about how this diagnostic skill is learned or how it should be taught. Some authors have pointed to a dual-process model, suggesting that assessments of illness severity are driven by two distinct types of processing: an intuitive, fast, pattern …