• Friederike Weber, Walter Hauke, Ina Jahn, Katarina Stengler, Hubertus Himmerich, Michael Zaudig, and Cornelia Exner.
• Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Leipzig, Neumarkt 9-19, D-04081 Leipzig, Germany. Electronic address: fweber@uni-leipzig.de.
• J Anxiety Disord. 2014 Oct 1; 28 (7): 679-86.

AbstractNeuropsychological assessments of participants with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) indicate impaired verbal memory if to be remembered material has to be organized. People with OCD also tend to focus their attention on their thoughts (heightened cognitive self-consciousness). We tested the hypothesis that cognitive self-consciousness causes verbal memory deficits by provoking a division of attention between study task and thoughts. Thirty-six participants with OCD, 36 matched healthy controls and 36 participants with major depressive disorder (MDD) learned under proactive interference in three study conditions: single-task condition, condition with heightened cognitive self-consciousness and condition with an external secondary task. Memory was impaired in the cognitive self-consciousness condition compared to both other conditions. Independent of condition, participants with OCD showed a reduced memory performance compared to healthy controls, but did not differ from participants with MDD. Our results are in line with the hypothesis that cognitive self-consciousness causes memory impairment.Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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