Overgeneral autobiographical memory in major depressive disorder is associated with abnormal neural activity during retrieval
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a psychiatric mood disorder that is associated with abnormal cognitive processes, including overgeneral memory (OGM) for autobiographical events. When asked to produce memories from their own lives, depressed individuals produce fewer specific memories than do their nondepressed peers. The neural basis of OGM in MDD, however, is not yet clear. Specifically, we do not know if depressed individuals exhibit normal memory-related neural activation during encoding; we also do not know if individuals with MDD show neural signatures that have been found to be related to retrieval of content, i.e. cortical reinstatement. To address these questions, depressed and nondepressed adults completed a standard measure of autobiographical memory specificity and, inside a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner, a paired-associates learning task. At the behavioral level, depressed individuals showed evidence of decreased specificity of autobiographical memory relative to healthy controls, but did not exhibit impairment in associative learning. At the neural level, depressed and nondepressed participants did not differ during encoding. During retrieval, a predicted difference between depressed and nondepressed participants in neural activity in the hippocampus was also not obtained. Importantly, however, compared to their nondepressed peers, depressed individuals showed less activity in the right prefrontal cortex during the successful retrieval of images. In addition, and also counter to hypotheses, there was robust evidence of cortical reinstatement of image category information in both depressed and nondepressed individuals. Together, these findings suggest that OGM in MDD is not related to an inability to reactivate visual information or to an inability to form or encode associative memories. Instead, it seems that if OGM in MDD is related to some systematic aberrant neural function, this abnormality is a subtle difference between depressed and nondepressed individuals in retrieval processes that is mediated by the prefrontal cortex.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Sorenson, James Eric |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Psychology. |
| Primary advisor | Gotlib, Ian H |
| Thesis advisor | Gotlib, Ian H |
| Thesis advisor | Knutson, Brian |
| Thesis advisor | Wagner, Anthony David |
| Advisor | Knutson, Brian |
| Advisor | Wagner, Anthony David |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | James Eric Sorenson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Psychology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by James Eric Sorenson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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