Perceptual decision making and metacognition in relation to obsessive-compulsive traits

Abstract

Metacognition is one of the cognitive functions that is shown to be altered in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Studies focusing on metacognitive efficiency have demonstrated disrupted precision of confidence estimates in OCD. However, the data of those studies may have been contaminated by the overestimation of metacognitive efficiency resulting from the use of the staircase method. We used a two-alternative forced-choice task in which difficulty was held constant within each block but varied across blocks throughout the task. No feedback was given to the participants. We collected data from 161 healthy university students with varying degrees of tendencies of OCD symptoms. Contrary to the previous literature, participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency had higher metacognitive efficiency. Applying the drift–diffusion modeling approach to the first-order decisions of participants revealed that participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency had lower efficiency in integrating perceptual information and less cautious thresholds. Finally, we investigated post-error slowing and found that participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency exhibited limited adaptation of responses to errors and low confidence levels. Overall, our results suggest that having a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency is associated with sufficient metacognitive capacity but also with limited utilization of the metacognitive information for behavioral adaptation.