Metacognition and memory in obsessive-compulsive disorder

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Cornelia Exner
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2010 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 173615368

Subjects with obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD) have been shown to be impaired on standard memory tests, especially if active encoding is required. However, it has proved difficult to related these findings to psychopathological symptoms of OCD and to incorporate findings of neuropsychological deficits into OCD disease models.Dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs and metacognitive regulation processes are increasingly recognized as part of the cognitive vulnerability for OCD.In the first part of this project we succeeded in establishing a new experimental paradigm for manipulating cognitive self-consciousness, which is one important aspect of dysfunctional metacognitive regulation in OCD. We could prove that high cognitive self-consciousness has a deteriorating influence on episodic memory encoding. However, it is still unknown whether dysfunctional metacognitive regulation in OCD is related to the known dysfunction of fronto-striatal circuits in OCD or whether further fronto-parietal circuits, which play a role in attention allocation, have to be incorporated into a neurobiological model of OCD.The current proposal aims at investigating the functional neural correlates of memory encoding under different attentional focus. The previously established experimental learning procedure will be used in a fMRI investigation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants