A Systematic Review of Executive Function and Information Processing Speed in Major Depression Disorder.

Laura Nuño,Oscar Pino,Juana Gómez-Benito,Viviana R Carmona

doi:10.3390/brainsci11020147

Abstract

Background: Major depression is a psychiatric disorder characterized neuropsychologically by poor performance in tasks of memory, attention, processing speed, and executive function. The aim of this systematic review was to examine the evidence regarding the neuropsychological profile of people with major depression and to determine which of two explanatory models—the processing speed hypothesis or the cognitive effort hypothesis—has most empirical support. Methods: We searched three relevant databases and reviewed the reference lists of the articles retrieved. The results obtained with the Trail Making Test and the Stroop Color-Word Test were reviewed for 37 studies published between 1993 and 2020. Results: The empirical evidence supports both hypotheses: cognitive effort and processing speed, suggesting that depression is not only characterized by psychomotor slowing but also involves a specific deficit in executive function. Discussion: We discuss potentially relevant variables that should be considered in future research in order to improve knowledge about the neurocognitive profile of depression. The main limitation of this study derives from the considerable heterogeneity of participants with MD, which makes it difficult to compare and integrate the data.

Highlights

Published: 22 January 2021Major depression (MD) is a severe psychiatric disorder with an estimated lifetime prevalence in epidemiological studies of between 8% and 16% [1,2,3,4,5]
The aim of the present systematic review is to analyze the mechanisms underlying the deficits reported by studies that have examined cognitive deficits in people with MD, and to determine whether these deficits are due to a slowing of psychomotor speed or to a specific executive deficit.To this end, we examine the performance of people with MD on the Trail Making Test (TMT) [23] and the Stroop Color-Word test (Stroop Test) [24]
MD on the simpler conditions of the TMT or Stroop test [15,17,33,36,38,58,63], suggestive of psychomotor slowing, this deficit may not be sufficient to explain their poor performance on more complex tasks, which are significantly affected with respect to the simpler test conditions

Summary

Introduction

Published: 22 January 2021Major depression (MD) is a severe psychiatric disorder with an estimated lifetime prevalence in epidemiological studies of between 8% and 16% [1,2,3,4,5]. Some studies have concluded that there is global impairment across a wide range of cognitive domains and that deficits in attention, memory, and executive function are perhaps especially prominent in people with MD [9,10,11]. Major depression is a psychiatric disorder characterized neuropsychologically by poor performance in tasks of memory, attention, processing speed, and executive function. The aim of this systematic review was to examine the evidence regarding the neuropsychological profile of people with major depression and to determine which of two explanatory models—the processing speed hypothesis or the cognitive effort hypothesis—has most empirical support. Results: The empirical evidence supports both hypotheses: cognitive effort and processing speed, suggesting that depression is characterized by psychomotor slowing and involves a specific deficit in executive function. The main limitation of this study derives from the considerable heterogeneity of participants with MD, which makes it difficult to compare and integrate the data

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion