Deficits in cognitive ability are common among patients with schizophrenia. The MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB) was designed to assess cognitive ability in studies of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and has demonstrated high test-retest reliability with minimal practice effects, even in multi-site trials. However, given the motivational challenges associated with schizophrenia, it is unknown whether performance on MCCB tasks affects performance at later stages of testing. The goal of this study was to determine whether there are differences between people with and without schizophrenia in how their performance on individual MCCB tasks influences their performance throughout the battery.

The sample comprised 92 total participants including 49 cognitively healthy comparison participants and 43 outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia. The mean age of participants was 44.2 years (SD = 12.0, range 21–69) and 61% identified as male. The Trail Making Test, Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia, Hopkins Verbal Learning Test – Revised, Letter-Number Span, and Category Fluency from the MCCB were administered in the same order at 2 different sites and studies from 2016–2022. The autocorrelation between t-scores for task scores within each participant was computed and then compared between control and outpatient participants to determine if there are differences between groups. Group mean t-scores for each task were also compared between groups.

We found no significant difference in autocorrelations across MCCB tasks between healthy comparison participants and outpatients. However, mean performance in all tasks was lower for the outpatient group than for the healthy comparison group. None of the tasks used stood out as having significantly lower mean scores than other tasks for either group.

Our findings suggest that performance on individual MCCB tasks do not affect performance throughout the battery differently between the healthy comparison group and outpatients. This suggests that participants with schizophrenia are not particularly reactive to past performance on MCCB tasks. Additionally, this finding further supports use of the MCCB in this population. Further research is needed to determine whether subgroups of patients and/or different batteries of measures show different patterns of reactivity.