Metacognition and episodic memory in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Effects of cognitive self-consciousness on visual memory in obsessive–compulsive disorder

“…Our results add to our previous correlational findings and those of other researchers that point to an association between high trait cognitive self-consciousness and lower memory performance (Exner, Kohl, et al, 2009;Goldman et al, 2008;Marker et al, 2006). Our new experimental findings take matters one step further and speak in favor of a causal influence of situationally heightened cognitive self-consciousness on reduced memory performance.…”

“…While previous studies demonstrated a relationship between trait CSC and memory performance (Exner, Kohl, et al, 2009;Goldman et al, 2008;Marker et al, 2006), this is the first study that experimentally manipulated situational CSC to investigate its influence on visual memory performance.…”

“…High internal consistency (˛= .94) was reported. The German translation consisted of the original items (Hoyer & Gräfe, 1999) and the translation of the seven additional items conducted by a bilingual colleague as described in Exner, Kohl, et al (2009). …”

“…Exner, Martin, and Rief (2009) could demonstrate that the dimension "Rumination" (tendency to focus on cognitive processes) of the German version (Emmelkamp & van Oppen, 2000) of the Padua Inventory (Sanavio, 1988) was associated with deficits in episodic memory even when depression and symptom severity were controlled. Another study revealed that CSC mediated group differences between OCD participants and healthy controls in episodic memory (Exner, Kohl, et al, 2009). Two studies found that CSC was negatively associated with implicit learning performance (Goldman et al, 2008;Marker, Calamari, Woodard, & Riemann, 2006).…”

“…Because this goal is difficult or even impossible to achieve, CSC requires a great amount of information processing capacity (for a detailed description see Wells, 1997Wells, , 2000. Janeck et al (2003) and Exner, Kohl, et al (2009) postulated that being excessively occupied with one's mental processes and thoughts reduces the attention capacity needed for encoding other material and thus could lead to memory deficits. One could conclude that OCD subjects with high CSC are permanently in a state of divided attention.…”