Stroop performance in major depression: Selective attention impairment or psychomotor slowness?
Abstract
Background Numerous neuropsychological studies reported impaired Stroop performance in major depressive disorder (MDD) patients.Methods The present study attempted to identify possible neuropsychological mechanisms involved in this impairment in untreated MDD outpatients (n=75) as compared to healthy subjects (n=83). Inspection Time, Finger Tapping, Simple and Choice Reaction Time were considered as measures of perceptual, motor, psychomotor speed, and response selection, respectively.Results MDD patients performed significantly slower than healthy controls in the neutral and the congruent conditions, but not in the incongruent ones. In order to identify predictors of Stroop performance, linear hierarchical regressions analyses were performed. Age, motor and psychomotor speed were predictors of response time and accuracy on Stroop performance. Significant correlations between response time and the number of errors in all three Stroop conditions were found in MDD patients, while such a correlation was obtained in the healthy controls only in the incongruent condition.Limitations Although education was included as a covariate in our analyses, suggesting that the observed effects could not be ascribed to education differences, further testing with education-matched samples is warranted.Conclusions Our study shows that the Stroop task performance is affected by both aging and MDD. Impairment in the Stroop performance can be predicted by psychomotor slowness and by vigilance level in MDD outpatients, but not by impairment of selective attention per se.
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Unmedicated depressed individuals, including children, adolescents, and adults, perform worse than healthy controls on feature-based selective attention tasks requiring attention to a task-relevant feature while ignoring a distracting feature.
“Many investigations of color-word reaction times have revealed that unmedicated depressed individuals (including children, adolescents, and adults) perform worse than healthy controls when required to attend to a task-relevant feature (e.g., color) while simultaneously ignoring a distracting feature (e.g., semantic meaning)16–19, including in an international sample of n = 1008 MDD participants”
From Paying attention to attention in depression (2019) · cites this paper as [16]
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- Authors
- Kertzman, S., Reznik, I., Hornik-Lurie, T., Weizman, A., Kotler, M., & Amital, D.
- Affiliations
- Tel Aviv University (IL)
- Corresponding author
- Kertzman, Semion
- Venue
- Journal of Affective Disorders
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2010-04
- Volume
- 122
- Issue
- 1-2
- Pages
- 167-173
- ISSN
- 0165-0327 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2080831335
- Cited by
- 62
- References
- 69
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 2 · 2012: 7
- FWCI
- 1.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Affective Disorders (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Pharmacology › Treatment of Major Depression
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
- Keywords
- Stroop task, major depressive disorder, selective attention, reaction time, response selection, sustained attention, aging, neuropsychological deficits
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Aged, Attention, Cognition Disorders, Major Depressive Disorder, Female, Humans, Male, Middle Aged, Psychometrics, Psychomotor Performance, Reaction Time, Reference Values, Reproducibility of Results, Stroop Test
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