Giuliani Mattia, Martoni Riccardo M, Gregori Grgič Regina, Crespi Sofia A, Cavallini Maria C, de'Sperati Claudio
Department of Clinical Neurosciences, IRCCS San Raffele-Ville Turro, Milan, Italy.
Laboratory of Action, Perception and Cognition, Faculty of Psychology, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy.
Front Integr Neurosci. 2017 Dec 22;11:39. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2017.00039. eCollection 2017.
The sense of agency (SoA) is a multifaceted construct, which can be defined as the ability to understand the causal relationships between our actions and sensory events. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) patients with checking compulsions often report a "lack of action completion" sensations, which has been conceptualized in the so-called "Not Just Right Experiences" construct. An intriguing explanation of this phenomenon comes from Belayachi and Van der Linden (2009, 2010), who suggest that OCD-checking patients are more prone to specify their action in a relatively molecular and inflexible way. Currently, there are no studies in literature which address this issue in OCD patients, except for the one of Gentsch et al. (2012), who suggested an altered SoA in these patients. Here we exploited a novel construct, gaze agency, to evaluate causal attribution capabilities in a group of 21 OCD patients (checkers) and matched healthy controls (HCs). Basically, two tasks targeted observers' capability to identify their own eye movements as the cause of concurrently presented beeps, which allowed us to measure agency sensitivity as well as subtle agency alterations in an ecological setting. We found a poorer performance in OCD patients as compared to HCs in many parameters of our tasks, suggesting a difficulty with causal attribution possibly due to both a reduced cognitive flexibility and a less functional gaze agency in OCD patients.
能动感（SoA）是一个多方面的概念，可定义为理解我们的行为与感官事件之间因果关系的能力。患有检查强迫行为的强迫症（OCD）患者经常报告有“行动未完成”的感觉，这在所谓的“不完美感”概念中有所体现。Belayachi和Van der Linden（2009年、2010年）对这一现象给出了一个有趣的解释，他们认为患有检查强迫行为的OCD患者更倾向于以一种相对具体且不灵活的方式来明确自己的行为。目前，除了Gentsch等人（2012年）的一项研究外，文献中没有关于OCD患者这一问题的研究，该研究表明这些患者的能动感发生了改变。在此，我们利用一种新的概念——注视能动性，来评估一组21名OCD患者（检查者）和匹配的健康对照者（HCs）的因果归因能力。基本上，两项任务针对观察者将自己的眼球运动识别为同时出现的哔哔声原因的能力，这使我们能够在自然环境中测量能动感敏感性以及细微的能动感改变。我们发现，在我们任务的许多参数方面，与HCs相比，OCD患者的表现较差，这表明OCD患者在因果归因方面存在困难，可能是由于认知灵活性降低和注视能动性功能失调所致。
