Understanding intention and agency in psychosis
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A game theory approach to understanding intention and agency in individuals with psychosis.
IRAS ID
226197
Contact name
Vaughan Bell
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University College London (UCL)
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Z6364106/2017/05/143, Data Protection Ref. No.
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
The way in which individuals make attributions about their own and others’ states of mind is central to the dynamics of social interaction. One core aspect of social cognition is the ability to detect social agents, that is, to determine if and when you are interacting with another social being. This is a core difficulty in psychosis where people may experience illusory social agents (for example, through voices) or repeatedly attribute the causes of events to illusory social agents (in delusions).
One of the difficulties with traditional social cognition tasks is that they tend to involve 'static' information processing or faked social interaction - potentially missing the aspects of social cognition most relevant to the experience of delusions and hallucinations.
To address this we have developed a set of online social experimental tasks where participants are assigned to anonymously interact with a partner, live, in simple cooperative and competitive tasks taken from game theory. Sometimes the partner will be another human, sometimes the partner will be played by the computer.
This study will examine whether there are differences between participants with and without psychosis in their ability to correctly detect if they are partnered with a real human or an AI. The study will also measure behaviour in the tasks and attributions of intention during the tasks.
We plan to recruit patients with psychosis from mental health services via established routes and additionally include psychometric measures to allow an assessment of psychotic symptoms, cognitive ability, and related difficulties (i.e. anxiety and depression).
REC name
London - Dulwich Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/LO/0022
Date of REC Opinion
22 Feb 2018
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion