Impaired Updating and Maintenance of Latent Structural Associations Underlie Cognitive Inflexibility along an Obsessive–Compulsive Dimension
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.
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BibTeX
@misc{tertikas2026impaired,
title = {{Impaired Updating and Maintenance of Latent Structural Associations Underlie Cognitive Inflexibility along an Obsessive–Compulsive Dimension}},
author = {Georgios Tertikas and Nadescha Trudel and Tricia Seow and Miriam Klein-Flugge and Tobias U. Hauser},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/5dnce_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5dnce_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Impaired Updating and Maintenance of Latent Structural Associations Underlie Cognitive Inflexibility along an Obsessive–Compulsive Dimension
AU - Georgios Tertikas
AU - Nadescha Trudel
AU - Tricia Seow
AU - Miriam Klein-Flugge
AU - Tobias U. Hauser
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/5dnce_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5dnce_v1/
AB - 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.
ER -