Implicit and explicit memory in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Memory and attention in Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder: a review

“…Instead, they found that OCD washers (n ¼ 16) were more accurate in recalling whether or not contaminated objects had been touched by clean or dirty tissues, suggesting increased memory for the context surrounding threatening stimuli rather than those stimuli themselves. In contrast to the above studies, Foa et al (1997) failed to find a memory bias among 15 OCD patients with contamination fears compared to 15 non-psychiatric controls despite the fact that the study employed both explicit and implicit measures of memory for neutral and contamination sentences.…”

“…Implicit memory accounts for the phenomenon that a person's behavior is often influenced by a prior experience even though the person is not trying to consciously retrieve that experience (e.g., Graf & Schacter, 1985;Roediger, 1990). In the noise task used by Foa et al (1997), implicit memory for a stimulus would be related to perceiving the noise as softer. Results of this study indicated that both OCD and control groups rated the noise accompanying old sentences as softer than that accompanying new sentences.…”

Inferential confusion, obsessive beliefs, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms: A replication and extension

“…Thus, general distress or other nonspecific psychopathology variables rather than OCD-specific variables may account for group differences. Conversely, a more consistent finding has been that individuals with OCD tend to show lower confidence in their memory, even when they perform as well as or better than comparison groups (Foa, Amir, Gershuny, Molnar, & Kozak, 1997;McNally & Kohlbeck, 1993;Sher et al, 1983;Tolin et al, 2001;Woods et al, 2002). The basis for this reduced confidence, however, is not clear, but one possibility offered by Constans, Foa, Franklin, and Mathews (1995) is that individuals with OCD experience a disparity between their actual and preferred memory vividness.…”

Attentional Focus During Repeated Checking Influences Memory but not Metamemory

“…Further complicating the current understanding of memory in OCD is the fact that some researchers have not found memory deficits under threat relevant conditions, when the to-be-remembered material is related to the individual's fear (Foa, Amir, Gershuny, Molnar, & Kozak, 1997;Radomsky & Rachman, 1999;Radomsky, Rachman, & Hammond, 2001;Ceschi, Van der Linden, Dunker, Perroud, & Bré dart, 2003). In fact, several studies have actually demonstrated that under personally relevant or anxiety provoking circumstances, individuals with symptoms of OCD actually have a more accurate memory, particularly for threat relevant information (Constans, Foa, Franklin, & Mathews, 1995;Wilhelm, McNally, Baer, & Florin, 1996;Radomsky & Rachman, 1999;Radomsky et al, 2001;Tolin et al, 2001;Ceschi et al, 2003).…”

“…Although the literature related to actual memory is relatively inconsistent, one increasingly common finding is that individuals who compulsively check tend to report less confidence in their memory for checking than individuals who do not compulsively check (McNally & Kohlbeck, 1993;Foa et al, 1997;MacDonald, Antony, MacLeod, & Richter, 1997;Tolin et al, 2001;Zitterl et al, 2001), although a few studies have not found significant differences between checkers and non-checkers (e.g., Tallis et al, 1999). Recent research suggests that the declines in memory confidence following repeated checking, at least in non-clinical samples, are larger than the changes in memory accuracy that have been observed (Van den Hout & Kindt, 2004;Coles, Radomsky, & Horng, 2006;Radomsky, Gilchrist, & Dussault, 2006) and that decreases in memory confidence appear to be most salient under conditions of high responsibility (Radomsky et al, 2001).…”