Reading focus
Syllabus: Why Do Obsessions and Compulsions Persist?
Compare action updates with reported confidence and consider the later evidence noted in the guide.
Why you’re reading it. Ask whether difficulty acting on information can be separated from difficulty knowing it.
A question to consider. How would you test whether an action–confidence difference predicts everyday rituals beyond general distress or task-specific performance?
Why this reading
Knowing how certain one feels and using that information to guide action are different capacities. Vaghi and colleagues separate confidence reports from behavioral updating in a changing environment.
Before you read
A learning rate describes how strongly a new observation changes a prediction. A change point is a shift in the process generating observations. Here confidence concerns a task prediction, not a general measure of self-confidence.
Read for
- Compare the updating of actions and confidence before interpreting their coupling.
- Examine the computational benchmark’s assumptions and which conclusions depend on a particular measure.
Consider afterwards
- How could two groups have similar average confidence yet use confidence differently when choosing their next action?
Editorial context
The comparison involved 24 adults with OCD and 25 controls; sixteen patients took medication. It did not establish causal direction or directly measure a neural mechanism. Loosen and colleagues (2024) found no association between OCD symptom scores and action–confidence coupling in their online community sample. Their reliability results also varied across measures. This is a qualified challenge to generalization, not a direct replication of the clinical group contrast.