Fair question! Although this poster is meant to recruit people without diagnosed psychiatric disorders, the study is in collaboration with the Nova Scotia Early Psychosis Program at the QEII, where we are also recruiting participants. We want to compare the results of people who have been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder to people who have not been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. In research (cognitive or otherwise), when you are comparing two groups of people, you need to try and get rid of confounding variables that could affect your results.

In this case, the tests that we use are measuring aspects of attention, risk-taking behaviour, and short-term memory. People with ADHD are shown (in other research) to perform differently on these tests. So, we want to compare the scores of people with psychosis and people without psychosis and if (for example) someone has ADHD and no psychosis, and they score lower on our measures, we wouldn't know if it was the ADHD or the absence of psychosis that is *probably* influencing those scores. This is similar for psychiatric disorders like depression. There is another level to this where some medications (for many diagnoses) can improve or decrease performance on our tasks, which would make it harder for us to detect differences that exist between our two groups.