An Empirical study of major depression and memory functioning: right hemisphere-related impairment in visuospatial memory

The current study revealed significantly lower scores on the Visual Memory, Delayed Recall, and Attention/Concentration indexes of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised (WMS-R) for inpatients with Major Deparession as compared to nondepressed contrast group. No between group differences were found for proportion of subjects to reach a learning criterion, number of trials to criterion, or percent learned by final trial. Depressed subjects showed greater information loss after delay on more complex, unstructured, uncued memory tasks. Increaed severity, scope, psychological, and physiological depressive symptoms were moderately associated with decreased performance on visual memory and delayed recall measures. The Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, Beck Depression Inventory, and SCID were better able to predict visual memory performance than verbal. Hamilton and SCID measures of depressive symptoms were better associated with WMS-R scores than were measures from the Beck. Although comparable in visuospatial processing ability, depressed subjects scored significantly lower than contrast subjects on most WMS-R measures of visual memory. The findings suggest compromised storage of visual-spatial information in depression, although results were not conclusive. The current findings were partially consistent with the neuropsychological literature on right hemisphere-related visuospatial impairments in depression.Ph.D., Neuropsychology -- Drexel University, 199