Cristo Todorov | PubMed Health

PubMed2004

Organizational strategy use in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have been demonstrated to be less likely to use spontaneously generated organizational strategies during verbal episodic memory and visuoconstruction tasks. However, whether this organizational deficit is generalizable to other areas of cognitive functioning has not been established. In the present study, we assessed whether adults with OCD are less likely to spontaneously generate organizational strategies during performance of an executive function test, the Self-Ordered Pointing Task (SOPT). Participants included 30 adults with OCD and 24 healthy controls. Groups did not differ with respect to the time to complete or number of errors made on the SOPT. Furthermore, group differences were not observed in the ability to generate organizational strategies or in the specific types of strategies employed to complete the SOPT. These findings indicate that a reduced use of organizational strategies in OCD is not present across all cognitive domains.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Procedural and declarative memory in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been associated with frontostriatal abnormality. This has led to the hypothesis that the disorder is characterized by abnormality of procedural memory. However, evidence for either procedural or declarative memory disturbance has been mixed, and few studies have directly assessed both of these forms of memory in the same patient group. In the present study, we assessed encoding and retrieval in declarative memory using the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT), and procedural memory using the Pursuit Rotor Task, in 27 adults with OCD and 29 matched healthy controls. Groups did not differ with respect to salient demographic characteristics or memory on the RAVLT. In contrast, patients with OCD performed significantly better than controls during the early, but not later trial blocks of the Pursuit Rotor Task. This pattern of results indicates intact encoding and retrieval in declarative memory, but abnormally enhanced procedural memory during the early course of learning in OCD. These findings may be consistent with striatal overactivation observed in neuroimaging studies of OCD, as well as the prominent role of the striatum during early stages of procedural memory.

Adolescent↗