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Short report
‘Jumping to conclusions’ bias in functional movement disorders
  1. Isabel Parees1,
  2. Panagiotis Kassavetis1,
  3. Tabish A Saifee1,
  4. Anna Sadnicka1,
  5. Kailash P Bhatia1,
  6. Aikaterini Fotopoulou2,
  7. Mark J Edwards1
  1. 1Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, UCL Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London, UK
  2. 2Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Mark J Edwards, Sobell Department, UCL Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK; m.j.edwards{at}ucl.ac.uk

Abstract

Background Patients with functional neurological disorders often report adverse physical events close to the onset of functional symptoms. In light of this, we wondered if there might be differences in the way these patients make inferences about novel information.

Methods We used a probabilistic reasoning paradigm, “the bead task”, in 12 patients with functional movement disorders and 10 healthy age-matched controls. We assessed the number of beads that participants needed to reach a decision and changes in the certainty of their decisions when confronted with confirmatory or contradictory evidence.

Findings Patients with functional movement disorders requested on average significantly fewer beads before reaching a decision than controls (2 vs.6 beads). When confronted with potentially disconfirmatory evidence, patients showed a significantly greater reduction in confidence in their estimates than controls. Half the patients reached a decision after one or two beads whereas no controls showed this bias.

Interpretation Patients with functional movement disorders requested less information to form a decision and were more likely to change their probability estimates in the direction suggested by the new evidence. These findings may have relevance to the manner with which patients with functional neurological disorders process novel sensory data occurring during triggering physical events.

  • Functional movement disorders
  • ‘jumping to conclusion’ bias
  • decision making
  • dystonia
  • motor control
  • motor physiology
  • movement disorders
  • tremor
  • DNU
  • paroxysmal disorder
  • Parkinson's disease
  • motor
  • neurophysiology

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Footnotes

  • Funding This work was performed at University College London Hospitals/University College London, which received a proportion of funding from the Department of Health's National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centres Funding Scheme; TAS was supported by a National Institute for Health Research Training Fellowship; MJE was supported by a National Institute for Health Research Clinician Scientist Fellowship.

  • Competing interests None.

  • Ethics approval NHNN/ION Joint Research Ethics Committee.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.