Factor Analysing Predictive Processing: No Evidence for a General Factor Across Tasks

The study examined whether dysfunctional predictive processing (how the brain predicts future events) represents a single mechanism underlying psychosis and related phenomena. Researchers tested 73 healthy participants using 6 different tasks measuring how people use their prior experiences when making decisions across language, memory, visual, and auditory domains. Factor analysis showed that performance in individual tasks was not caused by one common factor, but rather results were task-specific. Although a two-factor model better described the results than a single-factor model, the factors reflected correlations within individual tasks rather than a hierarchy of predictive processing. The results suggest that how individuals weight their prior experiences is specific to each task. The study concluded that it is inappropriate to use results from single tasks to propose a general predictive processing deficit in psychosis.