Cognitive Enhancement in Canadian Medical Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cognitive enhancing agents are substances that may augment functions such as memory, attention, concentration, wakefulness, and intelligence. METHODS: An anonymous, online survey containing a series of questions on the actual and hypothetical use of cognitive enhancers was sent via email to 647 medical students across all four years in one Canadian MD program. RESULTS: The response rate was 50% (326/647). Overall, 49 (15%, 95% CI: 11% to 19%) students admitted to non-medical and/or off-label use of one or more pharmaceutical stimulants, of whom 14 (4%, 95% CI: 2% to 6%) had used stimulants within the last year. Senior medical students reported recent use more often than junior students (8% vs. 2%, P = 0.04). Class seniority and male gender were both associated with positive attitudes towards use of these agents; favorable attitudes were associated with recent use of pharmaceutical stimulant and high-caffeine products. CONCLUSION: A substantial proportion of Canadian medical students have engaged at some point in non-medical and/or off-label use of stimulants for purposes of cognitive enhancement. Male students and those in upper years of the MD program were more likely to have used pharmaceutical stimulants in the last year, and have favorable attitudes concerning use of cognitive-enhancing agents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".