Decomposing Working Memory in Recurrent Major Depression: Impaired Encoding and Limited Maintenance Immune-to-Encoding Constraint

It is generally believed that working memory (WM) is dysfunctional in depression. However, whether this impaired performance originates from impaired encoding, maintenance or both stages is still unclear. Here, we aimed to decompose the abnormal characteristics of encoding and maintenance in patients with recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD). Thirty patients and thirty-nine healthy controls completed a spatial working memory task where the encoding time and the retention time could vary under different load levels. Encoding performance was assessed by comparing accuracies between short and long encoding times, and maintenance performance was assessed by comparing accuracies between short and long retention times. The results show a lower performance in depression than the controls. However, while the decreased accuracy by long retention (vs. short retention) was increased by a short encoding time in the control group, the retention performance of the depression group did not further suffer from the short encoding time. The generally impaired encoding, together with limited maintenance of immunity against the constrained encoding time, suggests a common bias for fixed internal processing over external processing in recurrent MDD. The paradigm provided in this study can be a convenient and efficient clinical test for assessing the WM encoding and maintenance function.