An EEG Investigation In Depression: The Effect Of Cognitive Processing

Abstract

Among clinical populations, depression patients tend to show impaired memory performance both in working memory and associative memory accompanied with disorders in neural activity in the DLPFC. However, it is unclear whether these deficits are related to selective deficits in different levels of processing, possibly due to a dysfunction of cognitive processing mediated by the prefrontal cortex. In order to investigate this possibility, the present study recruited individuals with high, moderate and low depression to examine the electrophysiological effects of cognitive processing in working memory and long-term memory with electroencephalography (EEG). As hypothesized, individuals with low depression showed a memorial benefit for deeper semantic processing whereas individuals with moderate and high depression did not. These findings provide supporting evidence of associative processing deficits among individuals with depression due to dysregulation of the frontal executive regions.