Ashleigh Harvey was recently awarded a grant-in-aid of research from Sigma Xi, a scientific research honor society. The grant is entitled “A Prospective Investigation of the Association between Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms and Response Inhibition Deficits” and is a part of Ashleigh’s master’s thesis, which she is currently working on under the direction of her advisor, Dr. Hanjoo Lee. Funds from the grant will be used to reimburse study participants, which are to be recruited nationwide through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform.
It has been suggested that response inhibition (the ability to inhibit a pre-potent response) deficits may play a role in the etiology and maintenance of obsessive-compulsive and related disorders (OCRDs), due to shared features of the disorders related to impulsivity. Extant research examining the role of response inhibition deficits in these conditions has been correlational in nature. Using computerized cognitive tasks, Ashleigh will examine response inhibition and OCRD symptoms across multiple time points to provide better insight into a direction of potential causality.