Effort-Based Decision-Making Paradigms for Clinical Trials in Schizophrenia:

Impairments in willingness to exert effort contribute to the motivational deficits characteristic of the negative symp-toms of schizophrenia. The current study evaluated the psychometric properties of 5 new or adapted paradigms to determine their suitability for use in clinical trials of schizophrenia. This study included 94 clinically stable par-ticipants with schizophrenia and 40 healthy controls. The effort-based decision-making battery was administered twice to the schizophrenia group (baseline, 4-week retest) and once to the control group. The 5 paradigms included 1 that assesses cognitive effort, 1 perceptual effort, and 3 that assess physical effort. Each paradigm was evaluated on (1) patient vs healthy control group differences, (2) test-retest reliability, (3) utility as a repeated measure (ie, prac-tice effects), and (4) tolerability. The 5 paradigms showe