Experimental Research On Cognitive Categorization In College Students With Different Hoarding Behavior Level

Hoarding disorder is an independent mental illness caused a series of psychological and behavioral disorders that makes people excessive access useless things and could not discard worthless items caused clutter piled everywhere. With the publishing of DSM-V, the hoarding disorder gradually gained the attention of domestic scholars. Previous studies found that hoarders' cognitive ability had a certain extent defects. The researchers think that the hoarders' behavior affected by the ability of cognitive categorization.The researches on the ability of cognitive categorization showed that it affected by many factors, but the previous researches mainly selected normal subjects and almost used significant category feature graphs as research materials. In experiment one, 65 undergraduate and graduate students from Guizhou Normal University have been chosen as subjects.The first part of experiment one, we used SIR scale and hoarding cognitive categorization cards to distinguish the hoarding behavior level of subjects, and then we used traditional categorization paradigm to check the characters of hoarding behavior, we used artificial insect images which are not easily cause the hoarding behavior,it could inspected that whether different level subjects shown different performance.In experiment two, we selected 64 undergraduate and graduate students of Guizhou Normal University as subjects,and used pictures about daily items which could easily trigger hoarding behaviors as stimulus.Then we changed the pictures' correlation and presentation so as to inspected whether these were the factors affected subjects' category performance.This study formed the following conclusions:(1)In the free categorization task of the hoarding cognitive cards, the higher score of SIR students created more categories and each of them included less items;(2)In the categorization task of the artificial insect images, the higher hoarding behavior level subjects took a longer time, but got lower correct rate. We also found that the higher level subjects had more prone to anxiety.(3)In the categorization task of the pictures about daily using items, the correlation of categories affected the categorization time, the higher correlation between categories the longer time to took.In the case of successive presentation, the higher hoarding behavior level subjects showed more influence by correlation and easily prone to categorization error.