Jordan News

Psychiatrists and psychologists at the University of Helsinki studied the effects of depression on vision, and the study confirmed that visual processing changes in people with depression, and this phenomenon – most likely – is related to information processing in the cerebral cortex.

The study, published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, compared the visual processing of depressed patients with that of healthy people, in cognitive tests, in which people compared brightness and contrast in simple patterns.

“What was surprising was that depressed patients perceived the contrast of the images displayed differently than non-depressed subjects,” says Veligami Salmela, a researcher at the Academy of Finland.

Depressed patients considered the visual illusion of the patterns to be weaker, and thus the contrast somewhat stronger than those who were not diagnosed with depression.

Salmela explains, “The variance was suppressed by about 20% among non-depressed people, while the corresponding rate for depressed patients was about 5%.”

It is important to identify changes in brain function that underlie mental disorders in order to better understand the onset of these disorders and how to develop effective treatments for them.

For this reason, the researchers believe that more research is necessary on the changes in the processing of visual information in the brain caused by depression.

“It would be useful to evaluate and improve the use of cognitive tests, both as research methods and as potential methods for detecting processing disorders in patients,” Salmela says.

For example, cognitive tests can be an additional tool in evaluating the effect of different treatments as treatment progresses.

“However, depression cannot be determined using a visual perception test; Because the observed differences are small and are particularly apparent when comparing groups,” says Salmela.