Action-outcome knowledge dissociates from behavior in obsessive-compulsive disorder following contingency degradation

ABSTRACTGoal-directed and habitual systems orchestrate action control. In disorders of compulsivity, their interplay seems disrupted and actions persist despite being inappropriate and without relationship to the overall goal. We manipulated action–outcome contingency to test whether actions are goal-directed or habitual in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the prototypical disorder of compulsivity, in which prominent theories have suggested that dysfunctional beliefs underlie the necessity for compulsive actions.OCD patients responded more than controls when an action was causally less related to obtaining an outcome, indicating excessive habitual responding. Patients showed intact explicit action–outcome knowledge but this was not translated normally into behavior; the relationship between causality judgment and responding was blunted. OCD patients’ actions were dissociated from explicit action-outcome knowledge, providing experimental support for the ego-dystonic nature of OCD and suggesting that habitual action is not sustained by dysfunctional belief.

Cultural differences in non-social neural processes

Chapter 3 presents a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between sociocultural experience and cognition, and for explanation of the differences in cognition and behavior between East Asian and Western cultures. It further reviews cultural neuroscience findings that uncover common and distinct neural underpinnings of cognitive processes in individuals from Western and East Asian cultures. Cross-cultural brain imaging findings have shown evidence for differences in brain activity between East Asian and Western cultures involved in perception, attention, memory, causality judgment, mathematical operation, semantic relationship, and decision making. The cultural neuroscience findings reveal neural bases for cultural preferences of context-independent or context-dependent strategies of cognition in multiple neural systems.

Biological Significance as a Determinant of Cue Competition

Many researchers have noted the similarities between causal judgment in humans and Pavlovian conditioning in animals One recently noted discrepancy between these two forms of learning is the absence of backward blocking in animals, in contrast with its occurrence in human causality judgment Here we report two experiments that investigated the role of biological significance in backward blocking as a potential explanation of this discrepancy With rats as subjects, we used sensory preconditioning and second-order conditioning procedures, which allowed the to-be-blocked cue to retain low biological significance during training for some animals, but not for others Backward blocking was observed only when the target cue was of low biological significance during training These results suggest that the apparent discrepancy between human causal judgment and animal Pavlovian conditioning arises not because of a species difference, but because human causality studies ordinarily use stimuli of low biological significance, whereas animal Pavlovian studies ordinarily use stimuli of high biological significance, which are apparently protected against cue competition