Original articleImplicit Sequence Learning in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Further Support for the Fronto-Striatal Dysfunction Model
Section snippets
Participants
Forty-one patients with a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder and 36 healthy control subjects participated in this experiment. The OCD patients were recruited from consecutive admissions to the Psychosomatic Hospital at Windach, Germany. They were diagnosed according to the criteria of the DSM-IV by consensus of a psychiatrist and an experienced clinical psychologist. These clinicians were not involved in conducting the experiments or in data analysis. Diagnoses were established on the
Results
All subjects performed the task well. Response errors were rare (mean values <2%). In Figure 1, group mean values of the individual median reaction times for each of the five trial blocks are displayed showing the expected pattern of decreasing reaction times over the first four regular blocks and a sharp increase of reaction times during the randomized sequence in block 5. A 2 (groups) × 5 (trial blocks) analysis of variance (ANOVA) for repeated measurements (using Greenhouse-Geisser
Discussion
The present results confirm the hypothesis that obsessive-compulsive disorder is associated with a reduced capacity for implicit learning of location sequences. This is the first report of disturbed serial reaction time task performance in OCD under single task conditions. Previous studies have used a dual task design (Deckersbach et al 2002) or adaptations of the SRTT during brain imaging studies (Rauch et al 1997, 2000). Dual task conditions, however, impose additional demands on the
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