Working memory as assessed by subject-ordered tasks in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Prefrontal cortex plays a key role in working memory.
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is associated with prefrontal cortex dysfunction.
• Understanding cognitive differences in OCD is crucial for diagnosis and treatment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate working memory performance in individuals with OCD compared to healthy controls.
• To explore the relationship between task performance, OCD symptom severity, and mood in patients.

Main Methods:

• A self-paced working memory task was administered to 18 patients with OCD and 18 healthy subjects.
• Participants completed tasks involving abstract words, common objects, and novel nonsense objects.
• Performance metrics included working memory span, recognition memory, and task completion time.

Main Results:

• OCD patients exhibited normal working memory spans and recognition memory.
• Patients with OCD were significantly slower in completing the working memory tasks (p < .005).
• Task completion time in OCD patients correlated significantly with OCD symptom ratings (r = .539, p < .05) and depression scores (r = .643, p < .01).

Conclusions:

• Despite intact working memory capacity, OCD patients demonstrate slowed processing speed on self-paced tasks.
• The findings suggest a potential dissociation between laboratory performance and real-world functioning in OCD.
• Prefrontal lobe dysfunction may underlie the observed performance deficits and their correlation with symptom severity.