# Targeting Cognition and Motivation in Coordinated Specialty Care for Early Psychosis

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA · 2024 · $1,251,514

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
 The purpose of this study is to expand measurement-based psychiatric care across 6 early
psychosis treatment teams in Minnesota, each providing coordinated specialty care and in total serving 200
individuals per year. Our first goal is to efficiently deploy valid longitudinal outcome measures across each
team, implement state-of-the-art informatics tools, and aggregate pooled data to inform and support
program evaluation activities as well as novel data-driven analytics. Our second goal is to perform a
practice-based research project designed to answer two questions: 1) Does a structured personalized
feedback session that includes an explicit focus on cognition and motivated behavior provide benefit to
stakeholders--service users, family members, and primary clinicians? 2) Can cognition and motivated
behavior be addressed as key treatment goals within real-world settings, using a 12-week mobile
intervention program?
 Our central scientific premise is that cognitive dysfunction and impaired motivated behavior are
critical unmet therapeutic needs in early psychosis. We have shown that auditory cognitive training can be
successfully delivered on a mobile device to individuals with early schizophrenia, resulting in significant
gains in global cognition that endure 6 months after the end of the intervention. We have also demonstrated
that the addition of social cognition training drives improvements in measures of motivated behavior. More
recently, we demonstrated that a 12-week mobile digital health coaching and social networking app
designed to target motivated behavior in early psychosis resulted in significantly greater improvements in
self-reported depression, defeatist beliefs, self-efficacy, and a trend towards improved motivation/pleasure
and negative symptoms (compared to a wait-list control). These improvements were maintained when re-
assessed 3 months after the end of the trial. Based on this work and on our experience running successful
coordinated specialty care teams, our project will address the following two aims:
 Aim 1: Establish highly reliable measurement-based psychiatric care for 200 early psychosis individuals
per year across 6 clinical teams; Harness clinical encounter data to perform novel data-driven trajectory
analyses, predictive modeling, and causal discovery analyses.
 Aim 2: Investigate potential benefits of identifying cognitive functioning and motivated behavior as
explicit treatment targets for individuals entering care; Study a well-defined 12-week mobile intervention
program to address these targets.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10895269
- **Project number:** 5R01MH120589-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
- **Principal Investigator:** Piper S. Meyer-Kalos
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $1,251,514
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-09-01 → 2025-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10895269

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10895269, Targeting Cognition and Motivation in Coordinated Specialty Care for Early Psychosis (5R01MH120589-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10895269. Licensed CC0.

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