Sources of Expert Advice: A Comparison of Peer-Reviewed Advice from the Literature with That from an Automated Performance Support System

The treatment of aggression, self-injury, and property destruction is difficult for clinicians. To ease their burden, clinicians may receive help in developing treatments from the scientific literature or from the new automated performance support systems. This study compares the treatment suggestions offered by these two sources of expert advice across 30 clients. Four clinicians obtained consultations from the Mental Retardation-Expert (MR-E), an automated performance support system, for client descriptions abstracted from the literature. The results indicated that MR-E, when compared with the literature, offered more positive proactive treatment suggestions, relied more on accelerative rather than decelerative approaches, and offered more treatments from which the clinician could choose.