Pupillary assessment and computational modeling of the Stroop task in depression

Abstract

Depressed individuals frequently display disruptions in selective attention, but the time course and specificity of these difficulties are not well-understood. To better understand the nature of attentional disruptions in depression, 28 healthy adults and 23 unmedicated depressed adults completed a Stroop color-naming task using a long inter-stimulus interval and pupil dilation was recorded as a measure of cognitive load. Both groups took longer to name the color for incongruent than congruent trials. Pupil dilation was also larger for incongruent trials than for congruent trials across groups, which suggested that pupil dilation reflected cognitive load on the task. Though the groups did not differ in the magnitude of Stroop effect in pupil dilation, depressed individuals displayed decreased pupil dilation in the seconds following stimuli relative to controls. Computational neural network modeling further suggested that observed effects were consistent with decreased prefrontal cortex activity, associated with decreased cognitive control. ᮊ

Open your eyes for prediction errors

“…Furthermore, this two-way interaction between congruency and accuracy in pupil size correlated strongly with individual differences in the congruency effect on error rates. Whereas these differences in pupil size between correct and incorrect performance (Critchley, Tang, Glaser, Butterworth, & Dolan, 2005;Wessel, Danielmeier, & Ullsperger, 2011) and between correct congruent and correct incongruent trials (Brown et al, 1999;Laeng, Ørbo, Holmlund, & Miozzo, 2011;Siegle, Steinhauer, & Thase, 2004;van Bochove, Van der Haegen, Notebaert, & Verguts, 2013;van Steenbergen & Band, 2013) have been well documented before, we are not aware of empirical studies that have investigated the interaction between accuracy and congruency. We believe that there are two important reasons for this.…”

Attention deficit in depressed suicide attempters

“…Attention deficits are common in major depression (Cornblatt et al, 1989;Lemelin et al, 1996Lemelin et al, , 1997Thomas et al, 1997;Lemelin and Baruch, 1998;Cohen et al, 2001;Koetsier et al, 2002;Liu et al, 2002;Ottowitz et al, 2002;Den Hartog et al, 2003;Egeland et al, 2003;Siegle et al, 2004), and may also be associated with risk for suicidal behavior. Using a continuous performance task (CPT), Horesh (2001) found higher rates of both omission and commission errors in adolescent suicide attempters compared to hospitalized non-attempters.…”

Emotional Experience and the Mood-Congruent Working Memory Effect in First-Onset and Untreated Depressive Disorder Patients

“…That is, the memory accuracy of negative affective pictures was significantly greater than that of positive affective pictures in the MDD group, but there was no such significant difference found in the HC group. There may be three possible explanations for the mood-congruent memory effect in depressive patients: First, because the maintaining of depressive state is related to increasing negative cognition and contemplation [42,43], the internal concentration of unconscious negative processing would use cognitive resources (particularly the resource of attention). The occupation of these limited resources would affect the processing of positive information, leading to a drop in memory performance on positive emotional information.…”