Interference-resolution mechanisms and their relevance to depression

描述(申请人提供)：“干扰”的概念在知觉和记忆理论中发挥了核心作用。100多年来，心理学实验和理论一直专注于了解干扰是如何在知觉、记忆和运动过程中解决的。在目前的说法中，干扰的解决需要执行过程的参与来控制认知的轨迹。我们提出干扰消解的研究有两个主要目标：一是了解干扰消解在不同加工状态下的运行机制，从而建立这些机制的心理和神经模型。第二个目标是将这一基础研究应用于严重抑郁障碍(MOD)。有一段时间，对干扰解决的主要观点建立在一个假设上，即只有一个机制来控制干扰。这种机制被认为是对无关或分散注意力的信息的抑制。然而，其他研究导致了这样的观点，即不同的任务可能有多种不同的机制。我们问这些机制有什么相似之处和不同之处。研究被诊断为重度抑郁症的个体，为检验我们对与这些过程相关的神经和认知环境的假设提供了一个重要的模型。这是因为在干扰解决过程中活跃的大脑皮层区域与那些与抑郁症有关的区域重叠。此外，了解抑郁症患者功能障碍的认知过程将进一步有助于完善抑郁症的认知模型，从而导致更有效的治疗。我们建议使用项目识别任务的变体来研究干扰解决问题。修改这一范式使我们能够研究在编码时、当信息存储在工作记忆中时以及在反应选择时发生的干扰。有一些迹象表明，临床抑郁症患者在所有这些阶段解决干扰的能力都有所下降，但工作记忆方面的干扰似乎特别突出。我们假设，从工作记忆中删除不想要的信息的缺陷与抑郁症患者的沉思有关，而其他处理状态的干扰解决缺陷可能与疾病的其他方面有关。这项研究与公共健康的相关性：患有严重抑郁障碍的患者经常进行所谓的沉思，继续关注反复重复的负面想法。这项拟议的研究检查了可能导致沉思的认知和大脑缺陷，希望能挑出这些缺陷进行治疗。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The concept of "interference" has played a central role in theories of perception and memory. For over 100 years, psychological experimentation and theory have been focused on understanding how interference is resolved in perceptual, memory, and motor processes. In current parlance, the resolution of interference requires the engagement of executive processes to control the trajectory of cognition. We propose research on interference-resolution that has two main goals: One is to understand mechanisms of interference- resolution operating at different states of processing, leading to creation of psychological and neural models of these mechanisms. The second goal is to apply this basic research to Major Depressive Disorder (MOD). For a time, the predominant view of interference-resolution rested on the assumption that there is a single mechanism to control interference. This mechanism was claimed to be inhibition of irrelevant or distracting information. However, other research has led to the view that there are multiple mechanisms that may vary from one task to another. We ask how these mechanisms are similar to and different from one another. Studying individuals diagnosed with major depression provides an important model for testing our assumptions about the neurological and cognitive environment associated with these processes. This is because the cortical areas that are active during interference-resolution overlap those that have been implicated in depression. Further, understanding the cognitive processes that are dysfunctional in depressives will further help to refine cognitive models of depression, leading to more efficacious therapy. We propose to use variations of the item-recognition task to investigate issues of interference-resolution. Modifying this paradigm permits us to study interference that occurs at the time of encoding, when information is stored in working memory, and at the time of response selection. There is some indication that patients with clinical depression have compromised abilities to resolve interference at all of these stages, but interference in working memory appears to be particularly prominent. We hypothesize that a deficit in removing unwanted information from working memory is related to rumination in depressed patients, and that interference-resolution deficits at other states of processing may be related to other aspects of the disease. Relevance of this research to public health: Patients with Major Depressive Disorder often engage in what is called rumination, continued focusing on negative thoughts that recycle over and over again. The proposed research examines the cognitive and brain deficits that may lead to rumination in the hope that these may be singled out for treatment.