Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder are less prone to false memories

• We investigated veridical and false memory as well as metamemory in OCD by using the DRM paradigm.
• While there was no difference in correct recall or recognition, OCD groups had lower false memory than the control group.
• OC groups were also less confident in false recognition decisions, implying better memory awareness.

Previous research on memory and metamemory processes in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) almost exclusively addressed veridical memory. The present study investigated veridical and false memory (recall and recognition of nonpresented information) as well as confidence in OCD. We compared checker OCD, non-checker OCD, and healthy control participants (HC) by using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm. Participants were given word lists, each of which consisted of semantically related words which were strong associates of a non-presented critical target word. They were then given a free recall and a recognition task. Although both OCD groups showed comparable correct recall and recognition performance to that of the HC group, OCD groups were less prone to false memories and reported lower confidence for these false memories than the HC group. Accuracy of global recognition estimates were similar across three groups. This pattern of results may partly be due to OCD groups’ reliance on item-based rather than relational processing at encoding.