Implications of the Lacking Relationship Between Cognitive Task and Self-report Measures for Psychiatry

Abstract

At the heart of science is measurement, and the quality of measurements limits the quality of the resulting conclusions. In psychiatric research, the most common measurement has traditionally been through self-report, using scales that assess the degree and frequency of psychiatric symptoms. However, self-report has largely been eschewed within biological and computational psychiatry for lacking the ability to provide mechanistic insights into the disorders in question. Instead, researchers now focus primarily on task-based measures of behavior combined with model-based analyses. This approach is thought to allow a deeper insight into the underlying neural and computational mechanisms whose dysfunction ultimately gives rise to psychiatric symptoms and illness. Indeed, the RDoC framework is explicitly built around these underlying neurocognitive dimensions. The measures proposed in the framework are meant to assess the function of mechanisms instead of or in addition to the frequency and severity of symptoms. The subjective nature of self-report, compared to the seemingly objective nature of cognitive tasks in combination with sophisticated computational models, has led many researchers to move away from the former.