Cognitive Neurocomputational Task Reliability and Clinical Applications Consortium: Study 3 (CNTRACS)

Researchers will recruit two samples of 2,000 to preregister hypotheses and then 3,000 to independently confirm those hypotheses.

Multiple methods will affirm the highest quality human self-report and behavioral data for online samples. First, researchers will use Prolific, which is known for high quality research participation, maintaining low levels of bots through strategies such as requiring a photo ID and a waiting period. Participants will complete 3 sessions, each limited to ~60 min to avoid burnout. Researchers anticipate complete data from 74% of participants, based on data completion rates in the previous online study.

General Cognitive Ability. Researchers will include standard general cognitive measures to assess the specificity of effects beyond general cognitive impairment. Specifically, researchers will include validated online measures from TestMyBrain (https://www.testmybrain.org/using-tmb/research.html; Digit Symbol Coding, Vocabulary, and Matrix Reasoning), as in our prior work in both clinical and healthy populations.

Self-Report Questionnaires: Researchers will use the Beliefs about Voices Scale which assesses attributions about the origin and power of voices, and the Yale Control Over Perceptual Experiences (COPE) scale, which evaluates the extent to which people feel they can exert control over their voices. Researchers will also use the Peters Delusion Inventory to assess the extent of delusional thinking, supplemented by the Green Paranoia Scale, which provides additional coverage of persecutory beliefs. To assess specificity, researchers will use the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to assess depression, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7)78 to assess anxiety, and the Motivation and Pleasure Scale-Self-Report (MAP-SR) to assess anhedonia and motivation with the addition of additional measures of psychosis (Aberrant Salience Inventory, Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire - Brief), alcohol use (AUDIT), cannabis use (Daily Sessions, Frequency, Age of Onset, and Quantity of Cannabis Use Inventory), and tobacco and other substance use (World Health Organization (WHO) Alcohol, Smoking and Substance Involvement Screening Test), as researchers will not have a Stuctured Clinical Interview (SCID) for on-line participants.

Researchers will also measure daily functioning using the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule (WHODAS) 2.0. Validity questions and procedures will be included. These measures will take 30 mins to complete, as researchers found in prior studies. Researchers will conduct a principal components analysis (PCA) on measures of the same construct (e.g., delusions) and perform primary analyses using the first principal component, followed by secondary analyses of specific measures False Discovery Rate (FDR) correction.