Psychometric Validation of a Scale for the Assessment of Prospective and Retrospective Expectations in Cognitive Enhancement

This project proposes the development and psychometric validation of the Expectation Assessment Scale for Cognitive Enhancement (EAEMC), an instrument designed to measure expectations related to cognitive enhancement interventions. The scale will consist of 24 items distributed across six a priori theoretical factors: attention, memory, reasoning, executive functions, social, and psychological domains, organized within a multidimensional model with a possible underlying general factor. Two parallel versions will be developed: a prospective version (EAEMC-P), employing language directed toward future events, and a retrospective version (EAEMC-R), employing language directed toward the past experience of the intervention. Both versions will be operationalized using a bidirectional visual analog scale (0–100). The study will be conducted in three complementary phases: (1) item construction and evaluation of content validity by expert judges and the target population; (2) data collection from a sample of at least 240 participants to evaluate the internal structure and validity evidence of the prospective version, as well as experimental administration of the retrospective version within a design involving expectancy induction; and (3) investigation of psychometric properties through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), item response theory (continuous response model), reliability indices, measurement invariance analysis, and evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. The project aims to provide a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust measure to control and investigate expectancy effects in research on cognitive training and neuropsychological interventions within the Brazilian context.