Memory and confidence in memory in subclinical obsessive compulsive checkers

Five experiments examined whether checkers, as compared to normals, remember fewer actions and make more errors in trying to remember actions (Experiments 1a, b), perseverate more (Experiment 2), report less vivid imagery (Experiment 3), benefit less from generating their own to-be-remembered words (Experiment 3), show explicit but not implicit memory deficits (Experiment 4), and have less confidence in their memory decisions (Experiments 3 and 4). Results indicate that as compared with normals, checkers neither perseverate more nor differ on tests of explicit or implicit memory. Further, checkers show the generation effect less strongly than normals, but this difference loses significance if guessing is accounted for. Checkers make more false alarms than normals. As compared with normals, they more often confuse whether they read or generated words at study. Finally, checkers remember fewer actions overall and more often misremember whether they performed, observed, or wrote these actions.