Celine Fox

Interested in the structure of psychopathology? We have a new preprint for you osf.io/preprints/ps... led by @celinef.bsky.social "Mechanistic arbitration between candidate dimensions of psychopathology"

Neureka | Citizen Scientist | Brain Challenges Neureka is a fun app designed by researchers at Trinity College Dublin. The app consists of fun brain games and challenges as well as questionnaires allowing the user to take part in one of the bigges...

10/10 Lastly, you can confidently travel through the brain, by downloading Neureka and playing Meta Mind today! www.neureka.ie

9/10 A massive thanks to my fantastic co-authors and collaborators, including @kellydonegan.bsky.social 🌟, especially the #Neureka team who gathered all of this wonderful data, our funders and my supervisor @clairegillan.bsky.social 🙏

8/10 Meta Mind exemplifies how to adapt established cognitive tasks for within-person, longitudinal assessments, facilitating the development and testing of causal models 🔄.

7/10 The high reliability observed may suggest that hybrid ‘self-report-cognition’ 🤝 tasks may be overall more reliable than behaviour-only assessments and thus be one way to bridge the reliability gap in computational psychiatry 🌉.

6/10 Metacognitive biases in decision-making are highly stable within-session, exhibit strong reliability 💪 and associations with clinical correlates are evident in as few as 40 trials, facilitating the rapid 🏃‍♀️ detection of individual differences in metacognition

5/10 We additionally observed high test-retest reliability with Meta Mind and replicated previously established associations with psychiatric dimensions 📈 in our very large sample of citizen scientists 🧑‍🔬

4/10 Relative to the traditional task, we demonstrated the convergent validity and excellent split-half reliability of metacognitive bias in Meta Mind ✅. In contrast, metacognitive efficient was neither valid nor reliable ❎ with Meta Mind (likely due to low trial N < 100).

Meta Mind game design

3/10 To achieve this, we developed Meta Mind 🧠, a gamified smartphone task 🤳 designed to measure metacognitive (confidence) bias and investigated its psychometric properties against a traditional metacognitive task

2/10 While metacognitive disturbances have been reported across various aspects of mental health 🙇‍♀️, most research has been cross-sectional. The next frontier is a shift towards repeated assessments of metacognition in individuals over time ⏰, through treatment 💊, and in real world environments 🌍

📢 Delighted to share the second preprint of my PhD work! 🎉
 
Across 2️⃣ experiments (N=3410 unpaid citizen scientists, N=52 paid participants), we developed a new smartphone game 📱👾 to measure metacognition 🧠 reliably, rapidly and remotely over time
 
osf.io/preprints/ps... … 1/10

We are recruiting a new PhD student to work on an exciting new area in our lab - developing passive smartphone 📱proxies for cognition and symptoms with lots of cool data science methods and a clinical focus on psychotic like experiences in the gen. pop. gillanlab.com/join-the-lab/

9/9 Lastly, a massive thanks to my other fantastic co-authors and collaborators, especially the PIP study team who gathered all of this wonderful data 🌟 and my supervisor @clairegillan.bsky.social, and our funders 🙏

8/9 This is important because it suggests that negative biases in anxious-depression are not fixed or final, they can change through time or through treatment.

7/9 Though these samples are too small for individual difference estimates, we note a general pattern across all arms, where changes in confidence over time track changes in anxious-depression. We think this suggests metacognitive biases in anxious-depression are state-dependent.

6/9 Among patients starting antidepressant medication 💊 (N=82) and a control group receiving no intervention 🙅‍♂️ (N=88), we found a significant increase in confidence in the antidepressant arm, but not among controls. Caveat, the interaction is p=0.06 🙃.

5/9 Turning to changes over time – anxious-depression significantly reduced after 4 weeks of iCBT 📉, and this was accompanied by an increase in confidence 📈. Importantly, those with the greatest reductions in anxious-depression levels had the largest increase in confidence.

4/9 Prior to receiving iCBT, ‘anxious-depression’ was associated with under-confidence, while ‘compulsive and intrusive thoughts’ was associated with over-confidence in performance, replicating 🔄 previous work and extending it to a new sample - treatment seeking patients.

3/9 They signed up online and completed a metacognitive task and self-report questionnaires at baseline and 4-week follow-up, without ever meeting us 🧑‍💻

The Precision in Psychiatry (PIP) study: Testing an internet-based methodology for accelerating rese... Background Evidence-based treatments for depression exist but not all patients benefit from them. Efforts to develop predictive models that can assist clinicians in allocating treatments are ongoing, ...

2/9 We collected these data as part of the PIP study, introduced by @ctlee.bsky.social. Participants initiating iCBT from SilverCloud via an NHS site or an Irish mental charity Aware, were invited to take part in our study. More on that here ⬇️

bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

An observational treatment study of metacognition in anxious-depression Improvement in levels of anxious-depression corresponds with increased confidence in performance among individuals receiving mental health treatment within a large longitudinal dataset.

🚨 🗞️ Excited to share our new study is now published in eLife! @elife.bsky.social

We tested the state-dependence of metacognition 🧠 among N=649 before and after 4 weeks of iCBT 🧑‍💻, along with a smaller antidepressant arm 💊 and a control group..
elifesciences.org/articles/87193 …a 🧵 1/9

Thanks Micah! Glad you enjoyed, looking forward to chatting with you when you visit us in the new year!