The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Psychiatry Res. 2011 May 15;187(1-2):125-9. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2010.10.001. Epub 2010 Nov 12.
The present study compared the performance of depressed youths and healthy controls on a modified mental counting task. The mental counting task was designed to capture processes associated with shifting the internal focus of attention by requiring participants to count random runs of words appearing on a computer screen. The words belonged to two different categories, and participants were required to maintain a count of the number of words in each category. Participants' reaction time to successfully update their counts and call for subsequent stimuli was measured. In particular, two versions of the modified counting task were developed: one incorporating neutral words and the other affective words. Overall, our findings in reaction time analysis suggest that depressed patients exhibited greater difficulty switching their internal focus of attention in the affective task when compared to healthy controls, even when controlling for their rate of accuracy. However, there was no significant difference between the groups during the neutral task. Results support the hypothesis that depression is related to impaired internal attention shifting when processing affective material.
本研究比较了抑郁青少年和健康对照组在改良心理计数任务上的表现。心理计数任务旨在通过要求参与者对计算机屏幕上出现的随机单词序列进行计数，来捕捉与转移内部注意力焦点相关的过程。这些单词属于两个不同的类别，参与者需要记录每个类别的单词数量。测量参与者成功更新其计数并请求后续刺激的反应时间。特别是，开发了两种版本的改良计数任务：一种包含中性词，另一种包含情感词。总的来说，我们在反应时间分析中的发现表明，与健康对照组相比，抑郁患者在情感任务中切换内部注意力焦点时表现出更大的困难，即使在控制其准确率的情况下也是如此。然而，在中性任务中，两组之间没有显著差异。结果支持这样一种假设，即抑郁症与处理情感材料时内部注意力转移受损有关。
