Sub-clinical compulsive checkers show impaired performance on habitual, event- and time-cued episodic prospective memory tasks

This study focused on examining whether sub-clinical checkers perform worse on a behavioral measure of habitual prospective memory, and on uncovering the source of a dissociation we previously reported between sub-clinical checkers’ performance on event- and time-cued episodic prospective memory tasks [Cuttler, C., & Graf, P. (2007). Sub-clinical compulsive checkers’ prospective memory is impaired. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 21(3), 338–352]. Undergraduate students were assigned a habitual prospective memory task, an event-cued and a time-cued episodic prospective memory task, and they completed questionnaires designed to assess problems with prospective memory in everyday life. Compared to low checkers, high checkers demonstrated higher failure rates on the habitual, event- and time-cued episodic prospective memory tasks, and reported more frequent failures of prospective memory in everyday life. The results showed that the previously reported dissociation was an artifact of the method used for scoring time-cued prospective memory. Our results lend support to the theory that a deficit in prospective memory contributes to the development and maintenance of checking compulsions.