USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications

Impaired filtering of irrelevant information in dysphoria: an ERP study.

SelectedWorks Author Profiles:

Max Owens

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

ISSN

1749-5016

Abstract

Behavioural findings have led to proposals that difficulties in attention and concentration in depression may have their roots in fundamental inhibitory impairments for irrelevant information. These impairments may be associated with reduced capacity to actively maintain relevant information to facilitate goal-directed behaviour. In light of mixed data from behavioural studies, the current study using direct neural measurement, examines whether dysphoric individuals show poor filtering of irrelevant information and reduced working memory (WM) capacity for relevant information. Consistent with previous research, a sustained event-related potential (ERP) asymmetry, termed contra-lateral delay activity (CDA), was observed to be sensitive to WM capacity and the efficient filtering of irrelevant information from visual WM. We found a strong positive correlation between the efficiency of filtering irrelevant items and visual WM capacity. Specifically, dysphoric participants were poor at filtering irrelevant information, and showed reduced WM capacity relative to high capacity non-dysphoric participants. Results support the hypothesis that impaired inhibition is a central feature of dysphoria and are discussed within the framework of cognitive and neurophysiological models of depression.

Comments

Citation only. Full-text article is available through licensed access provided by the publisher. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.

Language

en_US

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS