Individuals with epilepsy and a history of comorbid depressive symptoms exhibit disrupted fronto-temporo-limbic...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Anxiety and depressive disorders are linked to cognitive control deficits.
• Neural mechanisms underlying these deficits are not well understood.
• Stereotactic EEG (sEEG) offers high-resolution neural data for investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how anxiety and/or depression impact neural and behavioral responses during cognitive control tasks.
• To explore the role of frontotemporal circuits in cognitive conflict encoding in individuals with and without anxiety/depression symptoms.

Main Methods:

• Utilized high-resolution sEEG in 29 epilepsy patients undergoing monitoring.
• Administered the Multi-Source Interference Task (MSIT) to induce cognitive conflict.
• Analyzed oscillatory power, coherence, and phase locking values (PLV) using GLME models.

Main Results:

• Anxiety/depression group (A/D) showed a greater conflict effect (slower RT with increased load).
• A/D participants exhibited enhanced theta and alpha power in dlPFC and amygdala, plus broadband activity in LTL.
• Reduced theta coherence and PLV between dlPFC-LTL and dlPFC-amygdala were observed in the A/D group during conflict.

Conclusions:

• Individuals with anxiety/depression display heightened frontotemporal oscillatory activity and disrupted synchrony during cognitive conflict.
• These neural alterations may indicate increased cognitive resource allocation due to less effective processing.
• Findings suggest altered frontotemporal circuits in anxiety/depression, informing potential therapeutic interventions for cognitive control enhancement.