Discrepancy between self-reported and performance-based attention

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Clinical Psychology

Background:

• Subjective and objective attention assessments often show discrepancies.
• Little is known about how these discrepancies vary across attention subdomains or are influenced by depressive symptoms.

Purpose of the Study:

• Examine agreement and correlation between self-reported attention and performance-based measures.
• Investigate the impact of Major Depressive Episode (MDE) on attention discrepancies.

Main Methods:

• Cross-sectional study of 475 employees and students.
• Used Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) for depression and Continuous Visual Attention Test (CVAT) for attention.
• Assessed agreement (Cohen's κ), correlations (Spearman's ρ), and predictors of discrepancy (quantile regression).

Main Results:

• No agreement or significant correlations between subjective and objective attention measures.
• MDE participants showed significantly higher discrepancy scores, with 73% overestimating complaints.
• Depression severity was the strongest predictor of overestimation.

Conclusions:

• Depressive symptoms are strongly linked to a negative self-evaluation of attention.
• Individuals with depression tend to overestimate attentional difficulties despite objective performance.