Error-Related Negativity In Undergraduates With High Or Low Obsessive Compulsive Tendency

Response Error-Related Negativity (ERN) is a sharp negative deflection associated with monitoring action and detecting errors, and generally occurs from 20 to 100 ms following response execution. Several recent studies show that ERN is an indicator reflecting the level of Obsession-Compulsion (OC). In addition to ERN, some other components related ERN, such as feedback-ERN, early PE (Error-Positivity) and late PE, are always combined. In this study, we measuring the ERN in college students with higher or lower OC levels measured by OCI-R (Revised version of Obsessive Compulsive Inventory). Seventeen higher OC students and sixteen lower OC students performed a simple reaction task and a probabilistic learning task as soon and accurate as possible. A 2 (groups)×2 (accuracy) within-subject design was used.We found that four error-related components show no significant OC level effect was observed in ERN amplitude, response time and accuracy, but significant accuracy effects presented in most of all components. The response ERN and feedback ERN are different between two tasks. Some former findings about the error-related components are proved in our experiments. The discrepancy between our study and previous studies is discussed in terms of the participants and the inventory.