Event-based prospective memory in depression: The impact of cue focality

Abstract

This study is the first to compare event-based prospective memory performance in individuals with depression and healthy controls. The degree to which self-initiated processing is required to perform the prospective memory task was varied. Twenty-eight individuals with depression and 32 healthy controls worked on a computerised prospective memory task. Prospective cues were either presented focally or non-focally to the ongoing activity. Collapsing data across both conditions, controls outperformed individuals with depression in the prospective memory task. Overall, participants showed a poorer prospective memory performance in the non-focal condition that required self-initiated processing to a higher degree than the focal condition. Importantly, as revealed by a group by task condition interaction, groups did not differ in the focal condition, whereas, controls outperformed individuals with depression in the non-focal condition. The results are in line with the multiprocess framework of event-based prospective remembering and the cognitive-initiative account of depression-related cognitive deficits.

Keywords:

• Depression
• Prospective memory
• Self-initiated processing
• Automatic processing
• Executive functions

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participating clinics for their kind co-operation: Dr Hefti and Dipl.-Psych. Teschner from the Klinik SGM Langenthal and Dr Meisser and Dr Xepapadakos from the Klinik Schlössli.

Notes

¹Alternatively, increasing fatigue might also account for the observed group difference in PM performance. If individuals with depression are less likely to engage in self-initiated processing mainly due to fatigue, they should be even less likely to do so in the second block. However, additional analyses showed that the order of PM tasks did not affect patients’ performance. We thank Gil Einstein for this suggestion.