Meeting everyday challenges and responding in a goal-directed manner requires both the ability to maintain the current task set in face of distractors—stable cognitive control, and the ability to flexibly generate or switch to a new task set when environmental requirements change—flexible cognitive control. Cognitive control plays an important role in most psychiatric illnesses, including depression.
The purpose of the research was to determine the potential impairment of cognitive control pattern in depression compared to a control group matched in gender, education and age, and to examine whether certain subgroups of depression could be identified in terms of cognition. We used a newly developed and validated Cognitive Control Challenge Task (C3T).
The C3T is ecologically valid measure of complex cognitive control both in the general population (440 participants (8-84 years)) as well as in patients with depression (28 participants with major depressive disorder, 31 participants from the control group; 18-65 years ). The results showed that the development of both stable and flexible complex cognitive control follows the expected inverted U-curve and correlations with standard cognitive tests indicate that complex cognitive control captured by the C3T engages a broad range of cognitive abilities. We determined a specific pattern of cognitive impairment in depression that differs from controls not only in reduced psychomotor speed but also in a different way of functioning. Cognitive impairment is present in many cognitive domains. We identified four different subgroups of cognitive impairment that are qualitatively different from each other and are not typically associated with other depressive symptoms. Cognitive impairment is therefore a unique phenomenon in depression, partly independent of psychopathological status. However, as better cognitive control can be a mediating factor in a more successful management of psychopathological symptoms, cognition plays an important role in the course of the disease.
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