InhibCog

The symptoms exhibited by patients with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) suggest an impairment in “cognitive control” abilities. This hypothesis, which remains a subject of debate, has thus far been studied through the assessment of action control. These studies have demonstrated a deficit in inhibitory control of actions in OCD, which is linked to patients’ compulsive symptoms. Nevertheless, the generalization of this impairment to the cognitive control of thoughts—and in particular to the suppression of intrusive thoughts—remains unexplored. Yet this generalization would allow for a broader understanding of patients’ symptoms in their dual dimension of compulsions and obsessions.

To assess thought control abilities, we validated two tasks: Directed Forgetting (DF) and Think/NoThink (TNT), which allow for the evaluation of multiple behavioral markers of inhibitory thought control (Salomé Lippolis, Master’s thesis). The present study aims to combine these two tasks with a more traditional task of inhibitory control of actions (Stop-Signal Task, SST) to assess the overall inhibitory cognitive control of OCD patients.
Our Master’s student, Salomé, will administer these three tasks (DF, TNT, SST) to 20 OCD patients (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble Alpes Lyon Lumière Clinic) and 20 healthy volunteers. 

The behavioral markers of cognitive control will be:

1. A comparison between the OCD group and the control group to identify the presence of an inhibitory control deficit in individuals with OCD
2. In relation to patients’ symptoms of compulsions and obsessions, to assess the predictive power of cognitive control for the severity of OCD
3. By examining the relationship between thought control and action control, we aim to address the more fundamental question of the supramodality of inhibitory control abilities across actions and thoughts.

Ultimately, the goal will be to provide behavioral data from clinical settings for the functional assessment of OCD, which will also serve as preliminary data for neurophysiological investigations into cognitive control in OCD.