Abstract
We present a fully preregistered, high-powered conceptual replication of Experiment 1 by Smith, Tracy, and Murray (1993). They observed a cognitive deficit in people with elevated depressive symptoms in a task requiring flexible analytic processing and deliberate hypothesis testing, but no deficit in a task assumed to require more automatic, holistic processing. Specifically, they found that individuals with depressive symptoms showed impaired performance on a criterial-attribute classification task, requiring flexible analysis of the attributes and deliberate hypothesis testing, but not on a family-resemblance classification task, assumed to rely on holistic processing. While deficits in tasks requiring flexible hypothesis testing are commonly observed in people diagnosed with a major depressive disorder, these deficits are much less commonly observed in people with merely elevated depressive symptoms, and therefore Smith et al.’s (1993) finding deserves further scrutiny. We observed no deficit in performance on the criterial-attribute task in people with above average depressive symptoms. Rather, we found a similar difference in performance on the criterial-attribute versus family-resemblance task between people with high and low depressive symptoms. The absence of a deficit in people with elevated depressive symptoms is consistent with previous findings focusing on different tasks.
Highlights
Smith, Tracy, and Murray (1993) investigated whether depressive symptoms eliminate sophisticated cognitive strategies, but leave performance on tasks requiring simple or more automatic strategies intact
Smith et al (1993) assumed that in the CA task successful learning hinged on flexible analytic processing and deliberate hypothesis testing, whereas learning in the FR task was assumed to depend on a more automatic, holistic strategy, in which relying on the global degree of resemblance between the category members was sufficient to learn to differentiate between categories
The results showed that the group with the highest levels of depressive symptoms showed impaired performance on the CA task, but not on the FR task
Summary
Smith, Tracy, and Murray (1993) investigated whether depressive symptoms eliminate sophisticated cognitive strategies, but leave performance on tasks requiring simple or more automatic strategies intact They presented participants with two category learning tasks, in which they were asked to classify stimuli (four-letter nonsense words) in one of two experimenter-defined categories. Rutten et al: Depressive Symptoms & Category Learning: Replication higher depressive symptoms groups were more likely to have a psychiatric diagnosis, in particular a major depressive disorder (MDD), and were more likely to be inpatients, instead of outpatients (Smith et al 1993) This finding is consistent with related empirical work, suggesting that cognitive performance of people suffering from MDD is often found to be impaired on many, but not all kinds of tasks. Our study should be considered a conceptual replication (LeBel, McCarthy, Earp, Elson, & Vanpaemel, in press)
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