Evidence for a deficit in volitional action generation in patients with obsessive‐compulsive disorder

Abstract

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients show deficits in tasks of executive functioning like the antisaccade (AS) task. These deficits suggest problems in response inhibition or volitional saccade generation. Thirty patients (15 nonmedicated) and 30 healthy subjects performed antisaccades and simple volitional saccades (SVS), that is, centrally cued saccades. In SVS, two aspects of volitional saccade generation were disentangled: response selection and initiation. Latencies of OCD patients were increased in volitional saccades independent of response selection demands. AS performance did not differ. Across groups, latencies in AS were faster than in SVS. Medicated patients did not differ from nonmedicated patients. In sum, response initiation is deficient in OCD patients, which may reflect a general problem in volitional action generation. This deficit did not affect antisaccade performance, possibly due to a lower volitional demand in that task.

Volitional saccade performance in a large sample of patients with obsessive‐compulsive disorder and unaffected first‐degree relatives

“…In line with previous studies, latencies and within‐subject variability of latencies in the prosaccade task, which served as a control task of basic oculomotor function, were intact in patients and first‐degree relatives (Jaafari et al, ; Kloft et al, ). In contrast to previous reports (Kloft et al, ), neither patients nor relatives showed impairments in the performance of volitional saccades compared to healthy controls. There was no difference regarding within‐subject variability of volitional saccade latencies, and the examination of mean amplitudes of prosaccades and volitional saccades did not yield any differences between the three groups.…”

“…Furthermore, the lack of replication cannot be accounted for by lack of statistical power, as the groups of patients and controls were five times larger in the present investigation than in the previous study (Kloft et al, ; n = 22 for each of the three groups), and the sample of relatives was approximately 50% larger. Power analyses using G*Power (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, ) indicated that there was a power of > 99% to detect effects of the same sizes as reported by Kloft et al (). Alongside the large sample size, notable strengths of the present study include the thorough clinical characterization of subjects as well as the consideration of several covariates and moderating variables, such as symptom dimensions, medication, comorbidity, and age.…”

“…Importantly, in both studies, the impairments were found in tasks that did not require a competing response. In the same line, impaired performance of OCD patients was found in tasks that required volitional saccade generation without parallel response inhibition (Kloft et al, ; Kloft, Reuter, Riesel, & Kathmann, ; Maruff et al, ). The same deficit was observed in a small sample of unaffected first‐degree relatives of OCD patients, providing the first evidence for deficient volitional control of behavior as a candidate endophenotype for OCD (Kloft et al, ).…”

Variability in the decision process leading to saccades: A specific marker for schizophrenia?

“…Maruff, Purcell, Tyler, Pantelis, and Currie () showed that patients with OCD had no difference in mean RT of visually guided saccades compared to controls, while their mean RT increased significantly when they were asked to produce volitional saccades such as antisaccades and internally triggered saccades. Kloft, Kischkel, Kathmann, and Reuter () also showed an increase in mean RT for internally triggered saccades for patients with OCD, although they did not confirm a difference from controls for mean RT of antisaccades. In our previous study, all patients with schizophrenia that were tested were receiving antipsychotic medication.…”

Comparaison du concept de « responsabilité » en neurosciences et en droit pénal : une revue croisée de littérature pour l’expertise psychiatrique

“…Il s'agit le plus souvent de pathologies neurologiques, comme la maladie de Parkinson, les tics, le syndrome de Gilles de la Tourette ou encore certains types d'épilepsie [13]. En psychiatrie, des atteintes de la volition ont été mises en évidence dans le trouble obsessionnel compulsif [14], dans certains troubles du contrôle des impulsions [15] et dans la schizophrénie [16] où des voies neurales motrices des ganglions cortico-basaux [17] seraient altérées. Sur le plan neurobiologique, les pathologies dites « volitionelles » partageraient une forme d'altération du contrôle du comportement qui serait en lien avec des anomalies de l'axe dopaminergique [18].…”