The Sensory Gating Inventory-Brief

Abstract

The Sensory Gating Inventory (SGI) is a 36-item measure used to assess an individual’s subjective ability to modulate, filter, over-include, discriminate, attend to, and tolerate sensory stimuli. Due to its theoretical and empirical link with sensory processing deficits, this measure has been used extensively in studies of psychosis and other psychopathology. The current work fills a need within the field for a briefer measure of sensory gating aberrations that maintains the original measure’s utility. For this purpose, large samples (total n=1552) were recruited from two independent sites for item reduction/selection and brief measure validation, respectively. These samples reflected subgroups of individuals with a psychosis-spectrum disorder, at high risk for a psychosis-spectrum disorder, non-psychiatric controls, and non-psychosis psychiatric controls. Factor analyses and item-response models were used to create the SGI-Brief (10 Likert-rated items), a unidimensional self-report measure that retains the original SGI’s transdiagnostic (i.e., present across disorders) utility and content breadth. Findings show that the SGI-Brief has excellent psychometric properties (alpha=0.92) and demonstrates external validity through strong associations with measures of psychotic symptomatology, theoretically linked measures of personality (e.g., perceptual dysregulation), and modest associations with laboratory-based sensory processing tasks in the auditory and visual domains on par with the original version. Accordingly, the SGI-Brief will be a valuable tool for dimensional and transdiagnostic examination of sensory gating abnormalities within clinical science research, while reducing administrator and participant burden.

Reduced contrast surround suppression associated with schizophrenia depends on visual acuity and scene context

“…To avoid the psychometric pitfalls of sum scores 55 , we conducted a four factor oblimin-rotated EFA on the 36 item-level data and extracted ten Berge factor score estimates using the psych R package 56,57 . The four factor solution produced the most negative BIC (Bayesian Information Criterion, BIC = -1534.58) relative to the three and five factor solution suggesting the four factor solution best balanced model parsimony and fit which is consistent with previous work 42,58 (χ²(492)=886.05, p<.001, TLI=0.86, CFI=0.89, RMSEA=0.08). Loadings greater than .3 for each factor are presented in Supplemental Table 1.…”

Weakened untuned gain control is associated with schizophrenia while atypical orientation-tuned suppression depends on visual acuity

“…To avoid the psychometric pitfalls of sum scores ( McNeish & Wolf, 2020 ), we conducted a four factor oblimin-rotated exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on the 36 item-level data and extracted Jos ten Berge factor score estimates using the psych R package ( Revelle, 2021 ; Ten Berge, Krijnen, & Wansbeek, 1999 ). The four factor solution produced the most negative Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC; BIC = −1534.58) relative to the three and five factor solution suggesting the four factor solution best balanced model parsimony and fit which is consistent with previous work ( Bailey, Moussa-Tooks, Klein, Sponheim, & Hetrick, 2021 ; Hetrick, Erickson, & Smith, 2012 ; χ²(492) = 886.05, p < 0.001, TLI = 0.86, CFI = 0.89, RMSEA = 0.08). Loadings greater than 0.3 for each factor are presented in Supplementary Table S1 .…”

Faster bi-stable visual switching in psychosis

“…The Snellen fraction is reported (e.g., 1 indicates 20/20 vision). The clinical tests administered were: BPRS (Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale - Total Score; [ 93 ]), SPQ (Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire; [ 91 ]), BACS (Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia – Z-score; [ 92 ]), and SGI (Sensory Gating Inventory; [ 94 , 95 ]). The statistics column shows the test statistics and p -values calculated across the three groups for each measure.…”

“…We used a set of measures to assess psychiatric symptoms and cognitive functioning, which included the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ; [ 91 ]), The Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia; (BACS; [ 92 ]), The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS; [ 93 ]), and The Sensory Gating Inventory (SGI; [ 94 , 95 ]). Out of a variety of clinical assessments administered as a part of the pHCP [ 85 ], we chose these as they provide measures of overall psychiatric symptom levels, schizotypy, and cognitive functions, and previous work has found relationships between these factors and visual dysfunction in people with psychotic disorders [ 67 , 96 , 97 ].…”