HYPERVIGILANCE IN PATIENTS WITH OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER

The hypothesis that patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) suffer from hypervigilant attention was investigated via explicit memo ry (incidental recall and recognition) and priming (reading speed) mea sures. OCD patients did not differ from normal controls on explicit me asures of memory; specifically, recognition of unusual words (experime nt 1) and recall and recognition of words and feature-specific informa tion (experiment 2). Although both normal controls and OCD patients sh owed priming, the pattern of priming differed for the two groups (expe riment 2). Specifically, patients with OCD failed to show feature-spec ific priming, suggesting they may have attended more focally on the pr iming task than did normal controls. These findings support previous r eports of normal performance in OCD on explicit memory tasks, but sugg est more sensitive measures may reflect differences in processing info rmation. (C) 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.