Background: Cognitive dysfunction is a persistent residual symptom in major depressive disorders (MDDs) that hinders social and occupational recovery. Cognitive inflexibility is a typical cognitive dysfunction in MDD and refers to difficulty in switching tasks, which requires two subcomponents: forgetting an old task and adapting to a new one. Here, we aimed to disentangle the subcomponents of cognitive inflexibility in MDD and investigate whether they can be improved by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the prefrontal cortex.
Methods: The current study included 20 patients with MDD (seven females) and 22 age-matched healthy controls (HCs) (seven females). The participants received anodal tDCS on either the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in a crossover design. Before and after the application of tDCS, the participants performed a modified Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, in which the task-switching rules were explicitly described and proactive interference from a previous task rule was occasionally released.
Results: We found that the behavioral cost of a task switch was increased in patients with MDD, but that of proactive interference was comparable between patients with MDD and HCs. The response time for anodal DMPFC tDCS was decreased compared with that for anodal tDCS on the DLPFC in MDD.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that cognitive inflexibility in MDD is primarily explained by the difficulty to adapt to a new task and environment, and that tDCS on the DMPFC improves behavioral performance during cognitively demanding tasks that require conflict resolution.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/pcn.13364 | DOI Listing |
J Psychiatry Neurosci
January 2025
From the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ont. (Djimbouon); the Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Unit, Institute of Mental Health Research, Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ont. (Djimbouon, Northoff); the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany (Klar); and the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Brain & Behaviour (INM-7), Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany (Klar).
Background: Schizophrenia is hypothesized to involve a disturbance in the temporal dynamics of self-processing, specifically within the interoceptive, exteroceptive, and cognitive layers of the self. This study aimed to investigate the intrinsic neural timescales (INTs) within these self-processing layers among people with schizophrenia.
Methods: We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to investigate INTs, as measured by the autocorrelation window, among people with schizophrenia and healthy controls during both resting-state and task (memory encoding and retrieval) conditions.
Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging
January 2025
Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Background: Self-regulation often is disrupted in depression and is characterized by negative affect and inflexible parasympathetic responses. Yet, our understanding of brain mechanisms of self-regulatory processes largely has been limited to laboratory contexts. Measuring individual differences in self-regulatory processes in everyday life - and their neural correlates - could inform our understanding of depression phenotypes and reveal novel intervention targets that impact everyday functioning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTop Cogn Sci
January 2025
Department of Anthropolgy, Indiana University.
Studies of the evolution of language rely heavily on comparisons to nonhuman primates, particularly the gestural communication of nonhuman apes. Differences between human and ape gestures are largely ones of degree rather than kind. For example, while human gestures are more flexible, ape gestures are not inflexible.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Neurochem
January 2025
Department of Pathology, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of São Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental disorder characterized by several behavioral impairments, especially in socialization, communication, and the occurrence of stereotyped behaviors. In rats, prenatal exposure to valproic acid (VPA) induces autistic-like behaviors. Previous studies by our group have suggested that the autistic-like phenotype is possibly related to dopaminergic system modulation because tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) expression was affected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicroorganisms
December 2024
Department of Biotechnology and Environmental Microbiology, Autonomous Metropolitan University-Lerma, Hidalgo Pte. 46, Lerma 52006, State of Mexico, Mexico.
Unlabelled: Dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex can lead to cognitive inflexibility due to multifactorial causes as included cardiometabolic disorders, stress, inadequate diets, as well as an imbalance of the gut-brain axis microbiota. However, these risk factors have not been evaluated jointly. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of physical stress (MS: Male Stress and FS: Female Stress) and high-fat diet (MD: Male Diet and FD: Female Diet) supplementation on the gut microbiota and cognitive flexibility.
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