Browsing by Author "Erdogan, Yigit"

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The Effects of Late-Onset Depression on Brain Activity During an Episodic Memory Task
(Turkish Neuropsychiatry Assoc-Turk Noropsikiyatri Dernegi, 2025) Gulec, Zeynep Naz; Ercan, Melis; Erdogan, Yigit; Oguz, Kaya; Uyar, Aslihan; Burhanoglu, Birce Begum; Gonul, Ali Saffet
Introduction: Late-onset depression (LOD) has been implicated in irreversible cognitive decline, potentially mirroring early Alzheimer's Disease (AD) pathology. This study aimed to investigate brain activity differences during an episodic memory (EM) task in LOD patients compared to healthy controls (HC). Methods: We recruited 15 LOD patients and 13 HC matched for age and gender. Participants completed a face-name association task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) focusing on both the encoding and retrieval phases of EM. Results: The statistical contrast between the groups revealed that the HC group showed increased activity in the left visual association cortex (VAC) and left caudate compared to the LOD group during the encoding task. During the face recognition task, the HC group showed increased activity in the right caudate, and during the name recognition task, they showed increased activity in the right frontal eye field (FEF) compared to the LOD group. Conclusion: The differences observed between the HC and LOD groups in the VAC, caudate, and FEF suggest early changes in maintaining attention, goal-directed learning, EM formation, and coordination of information from storage to retrieval before apparent impairment develops in LOD. Although we did not find statistically significant activations in areas linked to increased vulnerability to AD, our findings of hypoactivation regions responsible for visual processing and attentional orienting in LOD patients are consistentwith hypoactivation patterns observed in AD patients in previous research. These results enhance our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying memory impairments in LOD and their potential overlap with AD pathology.
Citation - WoS: 4
Citation - Scopus: 8
Emotional Context Effect on Recognition of Varying Facial Emotion Expression Intensities in Depression
(Elsevier, 2022) Yildirim-Celik, Hande; Eroglu, Seda; Oguz, Kaya; Karakoc-Tugrul, Gulser; Erdogan, Yigit; Isman-Haznedaroglu, Damla; Eker, Cagdas
Background: Previous research has indicated that Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) patients have deficits in the process of facial emotion recognition. In most of these studies, isolated emotional faces were used, and the effect of the surrounding context of the face was neglected. We aimed to investigate how context emotion (sad or happy) affects facial emotion recognition and whether this effect is different in depressive individuals compared to the control group. Methods: Happy, sad, neutral facial expressions with congruent and incongruent visual contexts were presented to 51 MDD patients and 42 matched healthy controls. Emotional facial expressions are presented as morphs gradually expressing happiness or sadness with 40% and 80% intensity levels. Mean reaction time, mean accuracy rate, and mean emotion intensity rating score was calculated for each condition. Results: The performances on facial emotion intensity rating and accuracy rate were similar between MDD patients and controls. MDD patients were slower to recognize all facial emotions and to recognize facial emotions with emotionally incongruent backgrounds compared to congruent ones. Limitations: Antidepressant therapy of patients might have affected our results. Conclusions: Emotional contextual features have an important role in facial emotion recognition but this effect is independent of depression. Longer reaction time in depression may be related to some cognitive impairments.