MacDonald Angus W
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
Schizophr Bull. 2008 Jul;34(4):619-28. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbn038. Epub 2008 May 16.
Tasks developed for basic cognitive neuroscience are often ill suited for experimental psychopathology. The development of the expectancy variant of AX continuous performance task to test theories about context processing in schizophrenia is used as an illustration of how this has been done in one research program. Four design principles are recommended: tasks should (1) have a foundation in existing literature and therefore stay as close as possible to an existing task; (2) be simple, which is frequently accomplished by paring down a task to evaluate the function of interest; (3) probe a mechanism of interest, with conditions that selectively manipulate this mechanism; and (4) have the potential to distinguish a specific deficit on the mechanism of interest from a generalized impairment. Data from a number of studies support several aspects of context-processing theory; however unpredicted results have also been reported. The development of the expectancy AX paradigm continues, and future developments that may enhance its usefulness are also described.
为基础认知神经科学开发的任务往往不太适合实验性精神病理学。以AX连续性能任务的预期变体的开发为例，该任务用于测试关于精神分裂症中情境处理的理论，以此说明在一个研究项目中是如何做到这一点的。推荐四条设计原则：任务应该（1）以现有文献为基础，因此尽可能贴近现有任务；（2）简单，这通常通过简化任务来评估感兴趣的功能来实现；（3）探究感兴趣的机制，设置有选择地操纵该机制的条件；（4）有可能将对感兴趣机制的特定缺陷与一般性损伤区分开来。多项研究的数据支持情境处理理论的多个方面；然而，也报告了一些意外结果。预期AX范式的开发仍在继续，还描述了可能提高其效用的未来发展方向。
