Brain imaging was utilised in a new study published in the Elsevier journal Biological Psychiatry:
Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging to look at the mechanisms underlying how obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) sufferers perceive ambiguity. Neurological illness is characterised by compulsive, repetitive behaviours like cleaning and checking even when there is apparent objective proof that the environment is clean, orderly, and proper.
The study's investigators, under the direction of Valerie Voon, Ph.D., from the University of Cambridge, sought to examine processing in OCD and how capsulotomy influenced processing. It is considered to be a form of therapy that lowers brain activity linked to OCD.
Dr. Voon said, "We used a simple card gambling task like that commonly used in drinking games. Participants with an open card simply bet whether they thought the next card would be higher or lower than the open card. At the extremes, with high or low open cards, certainty is high, but uncertainty was much higher with cards near the middle of the deck."
The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula (AI), two brain regions associated with decision-making, were the main focus of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests. When determining certainty, OCD participants showed abnormal activity in this circuitry compared to unaffected controls.
