Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Using Motor Performance of the SISL Task to Identify Psychosis-Related Clinical Risk

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 3 - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Constitution A.

Ziyan Y. Han¹ (ziyanhan2026@u.northwestern.edu), Y. Catherine Han¹, Katherine S. F. Damme², Vijay A. Mittal¹, Paul J. Reber¹; ¹Northwestern University, ²The University of Texas at Dallas

Motor disturbances have been observed in disorders like psychosis and depression, and are hypothesized to be symptoms predictive of clinical risk. Using an online perceptual-motor learning protocol, the Serial Interception Sequence Learning (SISL) task, we show that motor precision and processing speed measurements can be assessed during a paradigm resembling rhythm-based video games. Within this task, participants attempt to make a series of precisely-timed motor responses to cues moving towards a target location. Throughout the protocol, speed of moving cues is individually adaptively adjusted to maintain a constant overall accuracy rate. In Experiment 1, response precision to the moving cues was compared for patients identified as Clinically High Risk (CHR) for psychosis and healthy controls. CHR patients exhibited poorer initial response precision (d = 0.91), consistent with the hypothesis that motor control may act as a biomarker for psychosis risk. Impaired precision improvement was furthermore linked to greater positive symptom severity within this group (p = 0.036). In Experiment 2, SISL performance measures were obtained from a large community sample of participants who also completed the Community Assessment of Psychotic Experiences (CAPE). Within this sample, participants scoring higher on a subscale related to depressive symptoms exhibited a tendency towards requiring slower overall cue speed to maintain performance accuracy, suggesting that motor slowing associated with depressive symptoms may also be detectable within this protocol. By evaluating multiple aspects of motor performance, the SISL task can potentially be utilized for identifying risk markers and uncovering motor related mechanisms related to clinical risk.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Motor control