I am really proud to announce that I have just preprinted my first ever paper on BioRxiv. In this paper, we investigate the link between metacognition and compulsivity.

Metacognition is the ability – or insight – to monitor your performance. So if you have good metacognitive abilities, you can reliably judge how well you perform on a given task. If not, you have difficulty to say how well you did. Obviously this is critical for our decision making, because you have to know how good you do in your tasks.

Interestingly, it has been suggested that many people with mental health problems have difficulties with such metacognitive decisions. Here we examined how healthy people with higher compulsivity scores perform on such a task. We find that high compulsive participants have a lower metacognitive ability. This difficulty extends a perceptual decision making weakness in our task.

Our findings support an idea of lower metacognitive abilities in a compulsivity spectrum, and thus suggest that metacognitive intervention may help people with higher obsessive-compulsive traits.

The link to our paper is here: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/05/098277