The role of controlled attention on recall in major depression

Abstract

Information processing biases are hallmark features of major depressive disorder (MDD). Depressed individuals display biased memory and attention for negative material. Given that memory is highly dependent on attention for initial encoding, understanding the interplay of these processes may provide important insight into mechanisms that produce memory biases in depression. In particular, attentional control—the ability to selectively attend to task-relevant information by both inhibiting the processing of irrelevant information and disengaging attention from irrelevant material—may be one area of impairment in MDD. In the current study, clinically depressed (MDD: n = 15) and never depressed (non-MDD: n = 22) participants' line of visual gaze was assessed while participants viewed positive and negative word pairs. For each word pair, participants were instructed to attend to one word (target) and ignore one word (distracter). Free recall of study stimuli was then assessed. Depressed individuals displayed greater recall of negatively valenced target words following the task. Although there were no group differences in attentional control in the context of negative words, attention to negative targets mediated the relationship between depression status and recall of negative words. Results suggest a stronger link between attention and memory for negative material in MDD.

Keywords:

• Depression
• Information processing
• Attention
• Memory
• Eye-tracking

Notes

¹ Mean time to first fixation for each stimuli type was also examined for MDD Group differences using repeated-measures ANOVA. The Valence by MDD Group, F(1, 31) = 3.31, p = .08, η_p² = .10, and Word Type by MDD Group, F(1, 31) = 3.29, p = .08, η_p² = .10, approached, but failed to meet, significance. Further, the three-way, MDD Group by Valence by Word Type interaction was not significant, F(1, 31) = 0.22, p = .64, η_p² = .01. Thus, there were no effects of attention initiation between groups.

² Simulations using identical means and variance–covariance structure indicated that this indirect effect would have been significant if N ≥ 45.

³ Simulations using identical means and variance–covariance structure indicated that this effect would have been statistically significant if N ≥ 43.