Investigating Retrospective and Prospective Metamemory Judgments During Episodic Memory in Patients With...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often report memory confidence issues.
• Metamemory performance, encompassing judgment and accuracy, is frequently impaired in OCD.
• The specificity of these metamemory deficits (domain-general vs. domain-specific) remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether metamemory deficits in OCD are domain-general or domain-specific.
• To examine the impact of stimulus domain on metamemory performance in OCD.
• To compare episodic memory and metamemory performance between individuals with OCD and healthy controls (HCs).

Main Methods:

• Comparison of OCD patients and HCs on recognition memory, retrospective judgments of learning (JOL), and prospective feeling of knowing (FOK) metamemory judgments.
• Utilized three episodic memory tasks with symptom-free, familiar, and unfamiliar stimuli (words, scenes, faces).
• Assessed performance accuracy and response times across all tasks and conditions.

Main Results:

• OCD patients demonstrated significantly lower recognition performance, JOL, FOK judgments, and accuracy compared to HCs across all tasks.
• OCD patients exhibited slower cognitive performance overall.
• Metamemory performance was reduced for familiar stimuli in both groups, but recognition was unaffected by stimulus type.

Conclusions:

• The findings support a general episodic memory deficit in individuals with OCD.
• Metamemory deficits in OCD are domain-general, affecting various memory judgments and tasks.
• This research highlights a broad impairment in self-awareness of memory processes in OCD.