InhibCog

Symptoms presented by patients with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) suggest an impairment in "cognitive control" capacities. This ongoing debate has traditionally been studied by evaluating action control. These studies have thus demonstrated a deficit in action inhibitory control in OCD, linked to patients' compulsive symptoms. However, whether this impairment extends to the cognitive control of thoughts, particularly the suppression of intrusive thoughts, remains unexplored. Yet, understanding this extension would provide a broader account of patients' symptoms across both their compulsive and obsessive dimensions.

To assess thought control capacities, we validated two tasks: Directed Forgetting (DF) and Think/No-Think (TNT), which evaluate multiple behavioral markers of thought inhibitory control (Salomé Lippolis, Master 1 work). The present study aims to combine these two tasks with a more conventional action inhibitory control task (Stop-Signal Task, SST) to assess overall cognitive inhibitory control in patients with OCD.
Our master's student, Salomé, will administer these three tasks (DF, TNT, SST) to 20 patients with OCD (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble Alpes and Clinique Lyon Lumière) and 20 healthy volunteers. 

The behavioral markers of cognitive control will be:

1. Compared between the OCD group and the control group to identify the presence of an inhibitory control deficit in OCD
2. Correlated with patients' compulsion and obsession symptoms to evaluate the predictive capacity of cognitive control for OCD severity
3. Correlated between thought control and action control to address the more fundamental question of the supramodality of inhibitory control capacities across actions and thoughts.

Ultimately, the goal is to provide clinical behavioral data for the functional assessment of OCD, which will also serve as preliminary data for investigating the neurophysiology of cognitive control in OCD.