Diagrammatic Reasoning Meets Medical Risk Communication

Abstract Informed consent for medical procedures requires that patients understand risks associated with diagnostic and treatment options. Similar to performance for diagrammatic reasoning and system dynamics, patients, physicians and medical students are reported to perform poorly on understanding medical risk-related information. At the same time, different presentation formats seem to support different kind of conclusions across domains. In this research, we investigated different formats of presenting risk information related to a treatment scenario with 22 medical and 50 nonmedical students. As expected, medical students performed better than non-medical students for all versions of the problem, while non-medical students could partially compensate missing medical knowledge with displays that reduce complexity and allow reducing cognitive load. This implies that it is possible to support patients' decision making, but also highlights the need to educate patients on potential risks and benefits