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Lookup NU author(s): Rachel Moss, Dr Andreas FinkelmeyerORCiD, Dr Lucy RobinsonORCiD, Jill Thompson, Dr Stuart Watson, Emeritus Professor Nicol Ferrier, Dr Peter GallagherORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2016 Moss, Finkelmeyer, Robinson, Thompson, Watson, Ferrier and Gallagher. Greater intra-individual variability (IIV) in reaction time (RT) on a sustained attention task has been reported in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) compared with healthy controls. However, it is unclear whether IIV is task specific, or whether it represents general cross-task impairment in BD. This study aimed to investigate whether IIV occurs in sustained attention tasks with different parameters. Twenty-two patients with BD (currently euthymic) and 17 controls completed two sustained attention tasks on different occasions: A low target frequency (~20%) Vigil continuous performance test (CPT) and a high target frequency (~70%) CPT version A-X (CPT-AX). Variability measures (individual standard deviation and coefficient of variation) were calculated per participant, and ex-Gaussian modeling was also applied. This was supplemented by Vincentile analysis to characterize RT distributions. Results indicated that participants (patients and controls) were generally slower and more variable when completing the Vigil CPT compared with CPT-AX. Significant group differences were also observed in the Vigil CPT, with euthymic BD patients being more variable than controls. This result suggests that IIV in BD demonstrates some degree of task specificity. Further research should incorporate analysis of additional RT distributional models (drift diffusion and fast Fourier transform) to fully characterize the pattern of IIV in BD, as well as its relationship to cognitive processes.
Author(s): Moss RA, Finkelmeyer A, Robinson LJ, Thompson JM, Watson S, Ferrier IN, Gallagher P
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Frontiers in Psychiatry
Year: 2016
Volume: 7
Online publication date: 16/06/2016
Acceptance date: 03/06/2016
Date deposited: 06/04/2017
ISSN (print): 1664-0640
Publisher: Frontiers Research Foundation
URL: http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2016.00106
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2016.00106
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