Interference Control in Children with First Episode Major Depression: A Brief Report

The ability to deal with sources of conflict, that is, interference control, was evaluated in a group of 11 children with first episode Major Depression and a peer control group. To this end, the Eriksen and Schultz (1979 Eriksen, C. W. and Schulz, D. W. 1979. Information processing in visual search: A continuous flow conception and experimental results. Perception and Psychophysics, 25: 249–263. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) task was used. Here, the participant is presented with a stimulus that simultaneously activates two conflicting response channels: One response is activated by the instructions, whereas the other response is activated by elements in the array that strongly invite an alternative — yet incorrect — response. Findings provided no evidence for an undisturbed interference control nor impaired overall processing speed in children with first episode Major Depression.