Dysfunction of Pre-Attentive Visual Information Processing in Drug-Naïve Women, But Not Men, During the Initial Episode of Major Depressive Disorder

Abstract

Women are twice as likely as men to develop depression. Few studies have explored gender difference in cognitive function of patients with MDD. The gender difference in the pre-attentive information processing of MDD patients is still poorly understood. To examine the gender differences in change detection, 30 medication-free MDD patients (15 women) and 30 age and education matched controls (15 women) were recruited. The deviant-standard reverse oddball paradigm (50 ms/150 ms) was used to obtain the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) in first episode MDD patients. Compared to men with MDD, women with MDD showed a significantly decreased increment vMMN, while no gender difference in decrement vMMN was found. The increment vMMN amplitude in MDD women was smaller than in healthy women, whereas no difference was found in decrement vMMN. Neither increment nor decrement vMMN differed between MDD men and healthy men. The mean amplitude of increment vMMN was not correlated with symptoms of MDD in MDD patients and MDD women. To conclude, the dysfunction of visual information processing existed at pre-attentive stage in MDD women.

The effectiveness of a virtual reality attention task to predict depression and anxiety in comparison with current clinical measures

“…Increased RT variability in the visual condition is consistent with increased inattention in this condition, which might indicate increased distractibility for visual stimuli for individuals with elevated symptoms of depression and anxiety (and possibly a sign of "wandering attention" when people get distracted by internal and external stimuli Stuss and Benson 1984;Tinius 2003). This result seems to sit in contrast to previous studies which showed impaired deficits in early auditory and visual processing in depressed and anxious samples (Chang et al 2011;Kahkonen et al 2007;Qiu et al 2011;Schirmer and Escoffier 2010;Takei et al 2009;Weinstein 1995;Yang et al 2019;Zweerings et al 2019). A potential explanation for our results is that previous studies assessed auditory and visual processing at early pre-attentive automatically processing of visual and auditory processing, while ours assessed attention and inhibition as higher cognitive functions.…”

“…Currently, the nature of attention deficits in depression and anxiety, especially in relation to sensory processing, is still lacking. Most research in anxiety and depression has focused on early pre-attentive and automatic visual and auditory processing and showed impaired deficits in early auditory and visual processing in depressed and anxious samples (Chang et al 2011;Kahkonen et al 2007;Qiu et al 2011;Schirmer and Escoffier 2010;Takei et al 2009;Weinstein 1995;Yang et al 2019;Zweerings et al 2019). However, sensory processing as modulated by attention has not been studied in depression and anxiety, which we plan to address in the current study by exploring attention performance on auditory and visual stimuli of individuals with elevated symptoms of depression and anxiety in comparison with individuals with low symptoms.…”