2026/01/21 by Magdalena del Río, Nadescha Trudel, Gita Prabhu +4 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Anxiety #Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes #Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies #Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders #Perspective (graphical) #Population #Replicate #Sample (material) #Sampling bias #TRACE (psycholinguistics) #Weighting
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41562-025-02385-1
published in Nature Human Behaviour 10(4), 727-740 (Nature Portfolio)
openalex created_date 2025/12/10 · openalex publication_date 2026/01/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Biases in information gathering are common in the general population and reach pathological extremes in paralysing indecisiveness, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Here we adopt a new perspective on information gathering and demonstrate an information integration bias whereby there is over-weighting of most recent information via evidence strength updates (ΔES). In a crowd-sourced sample (N = 5,237), we find that a reduced ΔES weighting drives indecisiveness along an obsessive-compulsive spectrum. We replicate this attenuated ΔES weighting in a second lab-based study (N = 105) that includes a transdiagnostic obsessive-compulsive spectrum encompassing OCD and generalized anxiety patients. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we trace ΔES signals to a late neural signal peaking at ~920 ms. Critically, highly obsessive-compulsive participants, across diagnoses, show an attenuated neural ΔES signal in mediofrontal areas, while other decision-relevant processes remain intact. Our findings establish biased information weighting as a driver of information gathering, where attenuated ΔES is linked to indecisiveness across an obsessive-compulsive spectrum.