Depression is associated with memory impairments and deficits in executive function. These two factors may be connected, such that depressed individuals, due to dysexecutive symptoms, may struggle to use effective encoding strategies, leading to diminished memory performance.
In our study, 21 patients currently experiencing moderate to severe depression and 20 age-matched control participants engaged in a memory task. In the first block, without mention of any specific strategy, they were asked to encode word pairs and subsequently completed an associative recognition task. Subsequently, they were asked to retrospectively report any mnemonic strategies they had applied. In the second block, participants were instructed to constructing a sentence using the words from each pair, as an effective associative encoding strategy.
The depressed participants exhibited significantly poorer item and associative memory performance and were less likely to report effective mnemonic strategy use after block 1, compared to the control group. However, both groups benefited comparably from the encoding strategy, leading to improved associative memory performance in block 2. Furthermore, subjective ratings regarding their ability to construct sentences with each word pairs did not differ between the groups. In conclusion, our study highlights the detrimental impact of depression on both item and associative memory performance, particularly in the context of impaired executive functions. However, similarly to non-depressed individuals, depressed patients can effectively utilize instructed mnemonic strategies to improve their memory performance.