Impaired Updating and Maintenance of Latent Structural Associations Underlie Cognitive Inflexibility along an Obsessive–Compulsive Dimension
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Impaired cognitive flexibility, the ability to form and update latent structural associations, is a hallmark of psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive (OC) disorder, yet its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Using a novel structural inference task, we dissociated three candidate mechanisms: (i) initial acquisition of associative structures, (ii) belief updating following structural changes, and (iii) inference about unobserved associations. In a large general-population sample (N=313), transdiagnostically characterised OC symptoms were linked to impaired updating following structural change and reduced generalisation to unobserved associations, whilst initial learning remained intact. Using fMRI (N=51), we found this was driven by overrepresenting structurally irrelevant associations in medial orbitofrontal cortex, and impaired formation of novel latent associations in posterior hippocampus. These findings reveal that OC-related cognitive inflexibility is grounded in dissociable fronto-hippocampal representational failures that impair structural model revision, rather than the capacity to acquire latent associations in the first place.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Institution: University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7223218719