Large-scale data collection for goal-directed drawing task with self-report psychiatric symptom questionnaires via crowdsourcing

Drawing is a representative human cognitive ability and may mirror cognitive characteristics including those associated with psychiatric symptoms. Therefore, analysis of drawing data collected from various populations such as healthy people and psychiatric patients may be beneficial for better understanding human cognition. However, collecting such large-scale data about the relationship between drawing and cognitive/personality traits offline-in a laboratory-is a difficult issue. To overcome this issue, we devised a novel experimental paradigm involving a goal-directed drawing task conducted online-on the eb-with participants recruited via a crowdsourcing platform. With the assistance of 1155 participants with differing levels of psychiatric symptoms, we collected a total of 194, 040 trajectory data and answers to seven different self-report psychiatric symptom questionnaires comprising 181 items. We visualized the collected trajectory data and performed an exploratory factor analysis on the correlation matrix of the psychiatric symptom questionnaire items. Our results suggest that there were associations between psychiatric symptoms represented by specific psychiatric factors and atypical behavior observed while performing the goal-directed drawing task. This indicates the efficacy of a dimensional approach to large-scale online experiments with respect to clinical psychiatry.