MEDIATIONAL FACTORS UNDERLYING COGNITIVE CHANGES AND LATERALITY IN AFFECTIVE ILLNESS (PROCESSING STRATEGIES)

Affective illness has been associated with lateralized right hemisphere deficits and global cognitive dysfunction. However, there has been very little exploration of information processing strategies which may underlie cognitive changes in this population. Twenty euthymic, drug-free affective illness patients and twenty controls were given a series of tasks sensitive both to lateralized impairment of the cerebral hemispheres and to sequential (analytic) vs. simultaneous (gestalt) information processing strategies. Although there was no difference between patients and controls in total errors on face recognition, there was a significant difference in the style of processing facial stimuli. Patients tended to rely on individual facial features for recognition while controls were able to synthesize multiple elements of the faces which suggests that patients have difficulty with holistic processing strategies. In addition, on a task which required holistic synthesis of multiple stimulus elements (Street Gestalt Completion Test), patients made significantly more errors than controls. Thus, specific information processing limitations rather than global or lateralized cognitive impairments are suggested in affective illness. An implication of these findings is that remediatory cognitive training in synthetic processing skills may relieve the ubiquitous complaints of memory, learning and thinking problems by affective illness patients.