In a study, researchers tested two stroke patients. Patient A produced halting, telegraphic speech ("walk... dog... yesterday") but understood spoken instructions normally. Patient B spoke fluently in long sentences but produced nonsense words and had great difficulty understanding speech. Imaging localized Patient A's lesion to the left frontal lobe and Patient B's to the left temporal lobe.
A clinician who diagnoses every fluent-aphasia patient as Wernicke's because that case is most memorable is exhibiting which heuristic bias?
- A
Functional fixedness
- B
Representativeness heuristic
- C
Anchoring bias
- Dcheck_circle
Availability heuristic
Explanation
Judging frequency by ease of recall reflects the availability heuristic; the most memorable or recent case dominates the diagnostic decision.