Open AccessDepressive Symptoms and Category Learning: A Preregistered Conceptual Replication Study
Author(s) -
Isa Rutten,
Wouter Voorspoels,
Sara Steegen,
Peter Kuppens,
Wolf Vanpaemel
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of cognition
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2514-4820
DOI - 10.5334/joc.35
Subject(s) - task (project management) , psychology , replication (statistics) , depressive symptoms , cognitive psychology , cognition , developmental psychology , clinical psychology , psychiatry , medicine , management , virology , economics
We present a fully preregistered, high-powered conceptual replication of Experiment 1 by Smith, Tracy, and Murray ( 1993 ). They observed a cognitive deficit in people with elevated depressive symptoms in a task requiring flexible analytic processing and deliberate hypothesis testing, but no deficit in a task assumed to require more automatic, holistic processing. Specifically, they found that individuals with depressive symptoms showed impaired performance on a criterial-attribute classification task, requiring flexible analysis of the attributes and deliberate hypothesis testing, but not on a family-resemblance classification task, assumed to rely on holistic processing. While deficits in tasks requiring flexible hypothesis testing are commonly observed in people diagnosed with a major depressive disorder, these deficits are much less commonly observed in people with merely elevated depressive symptoms, and therefore Smith et al.’s ( 1993 ) finding deserves further scrutiny. We observed no deficit in performance on the criterial-attribute task in people with above average depressive symptoms. Rather, we found a similar difference in performance on the criterial-attribute versus family-resemblance task between people with high and low depressive symptoms. The absence of a deficit in people with elevated depressive symptoms is consistent with previous findings focusing on different tasks.