Probing the Hypersalience Hypothesis-An Adapted Judge-Advisor System Tested in Individuals With Psychotic-Like Experiences.

Jakob Scheunemann,Steffen Moritz,Rabea Fischer

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2021.612810

Abstract

Individuals with psychotic-like experiences and psychosis gather and use information differently than controls; in particular they seek and rely on less information or over-weight currently available information. A new paradigm, the judge-advisor system, has previously been used to investigate these processes. Results showed that psychosis-prone individuals tend to seek less advice but at the same time use the available advice more. Some theoretical models, like the hypersalience of evidence-matching hypothesis, predict that psychosis-prone individuals weight recently available information to a greater extent and thus provide an explanation for increased advice-weighting scores in psychosis-prone individuals. To test this model, we adapted the previously used judge-advisor system by letting participants receive consecutively multiple pieces of advice. To meet this aim, we recruited a large MTurk community sample (N = 1,396), which we split in a group with high levels of psychotic-like experiences (at least 2 SD above the mean, n = 80) and a group with low levels of psychotic-like experiences (maximum 0.5 SD above the mean, n = 1,107), using the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences' positive subscale. First, participants estimated five people's age based on photographs. Then, they received consecutive advice in the form of manipulated age estimates by allegedly previous participants, with outliers in some trials. After each advice, participants could adjust their estimate. This procedure allowed us to investigate how participants weighted each currently presented advice. In addition to being more confident in their final estimates and in line with our preregistered hypothesis, participants with more frequent psychotic-like experiences did weight currently available advice more than participants with less frequent psychotic-like experiences. This effect was especially pronounced in response to outliers, as fine-grained post-hoc analysis suggested. Result thus support models predicting an overcorrection in response to new incoming information and challenges an assumed general belief inflexibility in people with psychotic experiences.

Highlights

Several cognitive models suggest biases in information processing as a factor for the formation and maintenance of psychosis [1, 2]
This study introduced the intuitive Aberrant Judge-Advisor System (JAS), an adapted JAS-paradigm
The Aberrant JAS captures—within a social framework—information integration relevant to cognitive biases related to psychosis

Summary

Introduction

Several cognitive models suggest biases in information processing as a factor for the formation and maintenance of psychosis [1, 2]. In the best-known paradigm to tap data gathering, the beads task [6] and its variants the fishtask [7] and box task [8], participants collect information before making a decision on a probabilistic reasoning task. We used an alternative paradigm, an adaptation of the judge-advisor system, to tap different biases concurrently [JAS; [9]]. Our adaptation allows to investigate how participants seek and use advice on estimation tasks, which are processes that likely involve the cognitive biases belief flexibility, jumping to conclusions, and confidence in judgements

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion