Contrasting mechanisms of depression by means of cognitive tasks and computational models

There are considerable differences of opinion about the underlying mechanisms of major depressive disorder. While some emphasize the importance of reward learning, others focus more on a negative mood, and still others emphasize the role of getting stuck in persistent negative thinking. In this task, I will present data from various tasks assessing these different cognitive mechanisms, and show that while impairments in reward learning are associated with depression scores, objective measures of persistent negative thinking are associated with rumination scores. I will then discuss how ACT-R models can explain the effects of persistent negative thinking on task performance in various tasks.