Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) are commonly endorsed in the general population as well as in individuals with non-psychotic disorders (Linscott and Van Os, 2013; Bhavsar et al., 2021; Rejek and Misiak, 2023; Rep et al., 2023). These include experiences such as seeing or hearing things that others cannot, feeling that familiar surroundings are strange or unreal, and worrying about the trustworthiness of others (Loewy et al., 2005). Individuals experiencing subthreshold psychotic symptomatology are at an elevated rate for future transition into psychosis and commonly experience co-occurring psychological and functional difficulties (Tsuang et al., 2013; Brandizzi et al., 2014; Reeves et al., 2014; Cooper et al., 2016; Gibson et al., 2016; Korenic et al., 2021).

Children and early adolescents commonly report PLEs at relatively high rates. Linscott and Van Os found in their systematic review and meta-analysis that younger age was associated with more PLEs in the general community, though the vast majority of these experiences were transient (2013). In a large study of children aged 9–11, 66 percent of the sample endorsed at least one PLE (Laurens et al., 2012). Of these, auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, and worries of being followed or spied on were reported most frequently. Another study by Gutteridge et al. (2020) found that 40.3 percent of children aged 9–12 years reported abberant perceptual experiences which was markedly higher than paranoid ideation and other delusional ideas. These findings suggest that PLEs, and potentially abberant perceptual experiences, may be more a feature of normative childhood development than previously thought.

While PLEs are common in childhood and most are transitory, they are associated with various psychosocial problems and have been found to predict conversion to a full-threshold psychotic disorder in adulthood. A recent population-based study by Sullivan and colleagues found that 60 percent of individuals with a psychotic disorder at age 24 experienced subthreshold psychotic-like experiences at age 12, consistent with past longitudinal findings (Poulton et al., 2000; Sullivan et al., 2020). Additionally, children and adolescents experiencing PLEs have been found to also report other problems related to depression, suicidality, self-harm, anxiety, substance use, and attentional difficulties (Kelleher et al., 2014; Pedrero and Debbané, 2017; O′ Hare, Poulton and Linscott, 2021; Jia et al., 2024). Hence, it is critical to understand which PLEs are part of normative childhood development and which PLEs may represent risk for later development of psychiatric difficulties.

Largely, however, research on specific PLEs in the general community remains limited across childhood and emerging adulthood obscuring the developmental course of these experiences. Therefore, we evaluated how specific PLE endorsement changed by age using two large multisite community-based samples spanning school-aged children, late adolescence, and early adulthood with the Prodromal Questionnaire-Brief, one of the most commonly used psychosis-risk self-report instruments (Loewy et al., 2011). The current investigation was conducted largely through an exploratory approach; still, we hypothesized that PLE endorsement would decrease with age and perceptual abnormalities would specifically be endorsed at greater rates in younger individuals.