Effects of Depression and Anxiety on Memory and Spatial Abilities

This study aims to further examine how individual differences in mental health traits are associated with the variation of different aspects of memory and spatial abilities through exploring associations between two mental health questionnaires (Self-Rating Depression Scale and State Trait Anxiety Inventory), three memory tasks (Face-Name Associative Memory Exam, symmetry span, and mnemonic similarity task), and two navigation tasks (mental rotation task and route learning task). This can help determine whether spatial abilities and memory variations can serve as indicators for disorders such as depression and anxiety. In analyzing both depression and anxiety with regards to memory tasks, we expect to see lower scores (lower associative memory ability) for both immediate and delayed recall scores for Face-Name Associative Memory Exam (FNAME-16), lower scores (poorer spatial working memory) for the symmetry span (S-Span) task, lower lure discrimination index (LDI) and thus poorer episodic memory ability for the mnemonic similarity task (MST). In examining depression and anxiety for spatial navigation tasks, we expect to see both mental health traits having lower average Z-scores (poorer spatial visualization ability) of number of correct responses and reaction time for the mental rotation task (MRT), and higher error scores (poorer performance) for the route learning task (RLT).