Who did it? Exploring gaze agency in obsessive-compulsive (OC) checkers

Introduction Clinically, OC-checkers often report staring compulsions and “lack of action completion” sensations, which have been linked to self-agency alterations. Belayachi and Van der Linden (2009) theoretically proposed that “abnormal” checkers self-agency could be due to an over-reliability on environmental cues and to a tendency to specify actions in a procedural and inflexible way, conceiving them as “low-level” agents. Currently, no studies have experimentally address this issue. Objectives To investigate self-agency in OC-checkers subtype, measuring gaze agency (the ability to understand that we can cause events through our eye movements) and taking into account both agency beliefs and agency feelings. Methods 13 OC-checkers and 13 healthy controls underwent two tasks. “Discovery” task, a completely novel task used to examine causal learning abilities. Subjects watched bouncing balls on a computer screen with the aim of discovering the cause of concurrently presented acoustical beeps. “Detection” task, a two-alternative forced choice task that required subjects to tell whether or not the beeps were generated by their own eye movements. Results Checkers exhibit: – lower performance scores and confidence ratings when they have to self-attribute the beep cause, but not eye behavioral differences, during discovery task; – lower confidence ratings, but a level of accuracy similar to that of controls, during detection task. Conclusions Checkers do not show an altered self-agency per se, but what we have called a “doubtful” self-agency: indeed, we argue that agency beliefs alterations found during Discovery task can be due to pathological doubt, rather than to altered agency feelings.