Onzekerheid door perseveratie van motorisch gedrag

Abstract

OCS patients check repeatedly to decrease their uncertainty about the object of checking, ironically this repeated checking seems to increase the uncertainty. There is reason to believe that the perseverative checking breeds uncertainty through semantic satiation. The theory states that perseverative checking leads to dissociative uncertainty and slowing in decision making, through the effect of semantic satiation. Giele (2011) found that normal subjects indeed had slower responses to a decision-making test, after repeating 20 checks, compared to repeating 2 checks. An objection to this finding was that the slowing in decision-making is a result of fatigue, instead of the effect of semantic satiation. To rule out this possible effect of fatigue, the subjects in this study were given the same kind of experiment, with the exception that they had to perform the same amount of checks in each condition. In accordance with the hypotheses and the results from Giele (2011), participants would be expected to have a shorter reaction time after 15 repetitions, the so-called “Long” conditions, compared to the 2 repetitions, the so-called “Short” conditions. However the interaction effect, between relatedness and repetition showed opposite results. Participants were found to be significantly faster in judging a related image, after 15 repetitions, than in every other condition. These results give no implication for the semantic satiation theory. But then the mean reaction-time found in the “Unrelated-Long” condition is inexplicable, which makes it premature to reject the theory of semantic satiation.