ArticleNature human behaviour2023
Inattentive responding can induce spurious associations between task behaviour and symptom measures.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers.
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Who cites it
56 citing papers in PubMed.
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- The recoverability, reliability, and generalizability of reward processing parameters and relation to mental health symptoms.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Dissociating volatility and stochasticity reveals transdiagnostic computational signatures of psychopathology.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Greater impulsivity is associated with a reduced propensity to cash out of bets.Addictive behaviors reports · 2026Article
- A unified framework for characterizing response quality in surveys with multi-item scales.Communications psychology · 2026Review
- Hybrid neural-cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Transdiagnostic mental health symptom dimensions predict use of flexible model-based inference in complex environments.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test Scores Demonstrate Poor Structural Properties in Nine Large Non-Clinical Samples.Assessment · 2026Article
- State Optimism as a State-Dependent Prior About Rewarding Outcomes.Computational brain & behavior · 2026Article
- Excessive Flexibility? Recurrent Neural Networks Can Accommodate Individual Differences in Reinforcement Learning Through In-Context Adaptation.Computational brain & behavior · 2026Article
- Addressing low statistical power in computational modelling studies in psychology and neuroscience.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Human approach-avoidance conflict behaviour relates to transdiagnostic psychiatric symptom dimensions.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Anhedonic Traits Do Not Impair Performance in a 3-Arm Bandit Task.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Why you shouldn't trust data collected on MTurk.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Neuroscience Needs Behavioral "Wind Tunnels" for Real-Life Translation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Causal inference and cognitive-behavioral integration deficits drive stable variation in human punishment sensitivity.Communications psychology · 2025Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Although online samples have many advantages for psychiatric research, some potential pitfalls of this approach are not widely understood. Here we detail circumstances in which spurious correlations may arise between task behaviour and symptom scores. The problem arises because many psychiatric symptom surveys have asymmetric score distributions in the general population, meaning that careless responders on these surveys will show apparently elevated symptom levels. If these participants are similarly careless in their task performance, this may result in a spurious association between symptom scores and task behaviour. We demonstrate this pattern of results in two samples of participants recruited online (total N = 779) who performed one of two common cognitive tasks. False-positive rates for these spurious correlations increase with sample size, contrary to common assumptions. Excluding participants flagged for careless responding on surveys abolished the spurious correlations, but exclusion based on task performance alone was less effective.
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