Rigorous development of a qualitative semi-structured interview guide contributes to the objectivity and trustworthiness of studies and makes the results more plausible. Researchers should consider using this five-step process to develop a semi-structured interview guide and justify the decisions made during it.

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Concurrently reduced conflict- and error-related activity in the anterior cingulate cortex along with reduced trial-to-trial adjustments in performance has not previously been reported in schizophrenia. The current results suggest that impaired conflict monitoring by the anterior cingulate cortex might play an important role in contributing to cognitive control deficits in patients with schizophrenia.

Objective Working memory (WM) capacity, typically measured with cognitively complex span tasks, is correlated with higher-order cognitive abilities in healthy adults. The goals of the present study were to determine: 1) if a more focused measure of visual WM storage capacity would show similar higher-order ability correlations in healthy adults and in people with schizophrenia (PSZ) thereby demonstrating the importance of simple storage capacity, 2) determine if the illness alters the pattern of correlations across cognitive domains, and, 3) evaluate whether between-group differences in WM capacity could account for the generalized cognitive impairment in PSZ. Method Ninety-nine PSZ and 77 healthy controls (HCs) completed a visual WM change localization task, the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI) and the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB). Results PSZ performed more poorly than HC on all cognitive measures. The between-group effect size for WM capacity was large (d = 1.11). WM robustly correlated with WASI and MCCB performance with no significant differences in the magnitude or pattern of correlations across groups. When the groups were pooled, WM capacity correlated at r=0.68 with MCCB composite score and at r=0.56 with WASI estimated Full Scale IQ. WM capacity accounted for approximately 40% of the between-group variance across the WASI and MCCB. Conclusions A simple measure of WM storage capacity is robustly associated with the higher-order cognitive abilities assessed by the WASI and MCCB in both HC and PSZ. WM capacity reduction may be a critical determinant of the general cognitive impairment in PSZ.