Please join us next week on November 22, 20201, Monday @ 12:30-1:30pm EST in person for a by our very own Yiyang Chen.
Yiyang Chen
Department of Psychology
The Ohio State University
Title: Modeling the continuous performance task for sustained attention
Abstract: The continuous performance task (CPT) is widely used to assess deficits in sustained attention among people with psychological disorders. In particular, individuals with first-episode psychosis have poorer performance in the CPT compared to individuals without first-episode psychosis, reflecting a potential attentional deficit associated with psychosis, but it is not exactly clear what specific factors may contribute to these between-group differences. We built a theory-based hierarchical Bayesian model for the CPT, which allows us to find the potential underlying mechanism for people’s performance deficits on the CPT by interpreting changes in the model’s estimated parameters. We apply this model to a data set consisting of individuals with and without first-episode psychosis, tested on the CPT from the MATRICS cognitive battery. Modeling results reveal that individuals with first-episode psychosis might have a reduced ability to attend to task-relevant in- formation compared with people without first-episode psychosis, which likely contributes to their lower response accuracies in the CPT.
Discussant: Inhan Kang