Schedule of Events | Search Abstracts | Invited Symposia | Symposia | Poster Sessions | Data Blitz

Susceptibility to proactive interference contributes to depression-related episodic memory impairments across the adult lifespan.

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Sarah E. Henderson¹, Kyoungeun Lee², Alexandra L. Clark¹, Vonetta M. Dotson², Audrey Duarte¹; ¹University of Texas at Austin, ²Georgia State University

Depression has well-known impacts on social and emotional well-being but is also associated with cognitive impairments affecting everyday functioning. Deficits in executive functions, as well as reduced volume of the prefrontal cortex supporting these functions, are well-established features of depression. Critically, they may also contribute to impaired episodic memory performance often experienced with depression, particularly when demands on executive functions are high. In the current study, we explore how varying levels of depressive symptoms influence susceptibility to proactive interference, measured covertly as neural reactivation of older, competing memory associations, and ability to resolve it during associative memory encoding, in individuals across the adult lifespan. We recruited individuals aged 18-75 years old who completed a proactive associative memory interference task during fMRI scanning. Individuals saw objects paired with either a face, a scene, or a color, some of which were presented multiple times with multiple different associates. Participants were instructed at retrieval to recall only the most recent associate. We find that greater neural reactivation, measured using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), of the previously paired image category (proactive interference) during encoding predicts a higher proportion of memory errors for re-paired items, particularly in individuals with depression. This suggests that depression-related memory deficit may be partially attributable to impaired ability to overcome interference from competing information.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Monitoring & inhibitory control