Planning Abilities in Patients with Anorexia Nervosa Compared with Healthy Controls

Objective: Altered cognitive functioning could have an important role in the development and maintenance of Anorexia Nervosa (AN). The majority of previous research has focused on flexibility and global-detail processing. The aim of this study was to explore planning abilities in women with AN. Method: Women with AN (n = 32) were compared to healthy controls (n = 42) using two different types of neuropsychological tasks for the assessment of planning abilities: Tower of London (ToL), a classic measure of planning abilities, and Zoo Map test, a more ecologically valid planning measure. Measures of AN psychopathology, anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsivity were also collected. Results: The AN group did not differ from controls in the ToL (all p-values p > .05), although they performed significantly worse than controls in the main score of the Zoo Map (p = .02). A worse performance in the Zoo Map test More was associated with more eating disorders (rho = −.44, p = .018) and depressive (rho = −.42, p...