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Articles, Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive

Enhanced Visual Motion Perception in Major Depressive Disorder

Julie D. Golomb, Jenika R. B. McDavitt, Barbara M. Ruf, Jason I. Chen, Aybala Saricicek, Kathleen H. Maloney, Jian Hu, Marvin M. Chun and Zubin Bhagwagar
Journal of Neuroscience 15 July 2009, 29 (28) 9072-9077; https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1003-09.2009
Julie D. Golomb
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Jenika R. B. McDavitt
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Barbara M. Ruf
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Jason I. Chen
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Aybala Saricicek
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Kathleen H. Maloney
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Jian Hu
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Marvin M. Chun
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Zubin Bhagwagar
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Abstract

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a mood disorder that is not traditionally considered to affect the visual system. However, recent findings have reported decreased cortical levels of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA in occipital cortex. To explore possible functional consequences of MDD on visual processing, we applied a psychophysical visual motion processing task in which healthy young adults typically exhibit impaired perceptual discrimination of large high-contrast stimuli. It has been suggested that this phenomenon, spatial suppression, is mediated by GABAergic center–surround antagonism in visual pathways. Based on previous findings linking MDD to occipital GABA dysfunction, we hypothesized that MDD patients would exhibit decreased spatial suppression, leading to the counterintuitive hypothesis of better psychophysical performance. Indeed, motion perception for typically suppressed stimuli was enhanced in patients with MDD compared with age-matched controls. Furthermore, the degree of spatial suppression correlated with an individual's illness load; patients with greater lifetime duration of depression exhibited the least spatial suppression and performed the best in the high-contrast motion discrimination task. Notably, this decrease in spatial suppression persisted beyond recovery and without the confound of acute illness or treatment; all patients had been clinically recovered and unmedicated for several months at the time of testing, suggesting that depression has ubiquitous consequences that may persist long after mood symptoms have receded. This finding raises the possibility that spatial suppression may represent a sensitive endophenotypic marker of trait vulnerability in MDD.

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The Journal of Neuroscience: 29 (28)
Journal of Neuroscience
Vol. 29, Issue 28
15 Jul 2009
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Enhanced Visual Motion Perception in Major Depressive Disorder
Julie D. Golomb, Jenika R. B. McDavitt, Barbara M. Ruf, Jason I. Chen, Aybala Saricicek, Kathleen H. Maloney, Jian Hu, Marvin M. Chun, Zubin Bhagwagar
Journal of Neuroscience 15 July 2009, 29 (28) 9072-9077; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1003-09.2009

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Enhanced Visual Motion Perception in Major Depressive Disorder
Julie D. Golomb, Jenika R. B. McDavitt, Barbara M. Ruf, Jason I. Chen, Aybala Saricicek, Kathleen H. Maloney, Jian Hu, Marvin M. Chun, Zubin Bhagwagar
Journal of Neuroscience 15 July 2009, 29 (28) 9072-9077; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1003-09.2009
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  • The role of cortical surround-suppression in this psychophysical effect is disputed
    Craig R Aaen-Stockdale
    Published on: 14 August 2009
  • Published on: (14 August 2009)
    Page navigation anchor for The role of cortical surround-suppression in this psychophysical effect is disputed
    The role of cortical surround-suppression in this psychophysical effect is disputed
    • Craig R Aaen-Stockdale, Postdoctoral Research Assistant

    In this paper, Golomb et al. use a psychophysical technique developed by Tadin et al (2003) to measure surround-suppressive interactions in visual cortex. However, there is actually very little evidence that thresholds obtained with this technique have anything to do with center-surround antagonism. My colleagues and I published data, concurrently with Golomb et al., which suggest that the paradoxical "impairments" in...

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    In this paper, Golomb et al. use a psychophysical technique developed by Tadin et al (2003) to measure surround-suppressive interactions in visual cortex. However, there is actually very little evidence that thresholds obtained with this technique have anything to do with center-surround antagonism. My colleagues and I published data, concurrently with Golomb et al., which suggest that the paradoxical "impairments" in motion perception in normal subjects (and therefore perceived "improvements" in abnormal populations) are a consequence of how the contrast and size of the stimulus are co-varied (Aaen-Stockdale et al., 2009). We found that motion discrimination thresholds are entirely predictable from the observer's contrast threshold at each stimulus size. These low-level factors can explain the effect reasonably well without any need to invoke center-surround antagonism. It remains to be seen what is causing the difference between normal subjects and recovered depressives, but we suspect that it is not surround suppression. This obviously throws doubt on the speculative connection with degraded GABAergic center-surround mechanisms in the depressed population.

    Aaen-Stockdale, C. R., Thompson, B., Huang, P.-C., & Hess, R. F. (2009). Low-level mechanisms may contribute to paradoxical motion percepts. Journal of Vision, 9(5):9, 1-14, http://journalofvision.org/9/5/9/, doi:10.1167/9.5.9.

    Tadin, D., Lappin, J. S., Gilroy, L. A., & Blake, R. (2003). Perceptual consequences of centre-surround antagonism in visual motion processing. Nature, 424, 312–315.

    Show Less
    Competing Interests: None declared.

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