The symptoms of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) are suggestive of cognitive rigidity, and previous work identified impaired flexible responding on set-shifting tasks in such patients. The basal ganglia are central to habit learning and are thought to be abnormal in OCD, contributing to inflexible, rigid habitual patterns of behaviour. Here, we demonstrate that increased cognitive inflexibility, indexed by poor performance on the set-shifting task, correlated with putamen morphology, and that patients and their asymptomatic relatives had common curvature abnormalities within this same structure. The association between the structure of the putamen and the extradimensional errors was found to be significantly familial in OCD proband–relative pairs. The data implicate changes in basal ganglia structure linked to cognitive inflexibility as a familial marker of OCD. This may reflect a predisposing heightened propensity toward habitual response patterns and deficits in goal-directed planning.

强迫症 (OCD) 的症状提示认知僵硬，之前的工作发现此类患者对设定转换任务的灵活反应受损。基底神经节是习惯学习的核心，在强迫症中被认为是异常的，导致不灵活、僵化的行为习惯模式。在这里，我们证明了认知不灵活的增加，以在换组任务上表现不佳为指标，与壳核形态相关，并且患者及其无症状亲属在同一结构内具有常见的曲率异常。发现壳核结构与超维误差之间的关联在强迫症先证者 - 亲属对中具有显着的家族性。数据暗示基底神经节结构的变化与作为强迫症家族标志物的认知僵化相关。这可能反映了对习惯性反应模式和目标导向计划缺陷的倾向性增强。