Impaired Visuospatial Working Memory but Preserved Attentional Control in Bipolar Disorder

BACKGROUND Persistent deficits in working memory (WM) and attention have considerable clinical and functional impact in people with bipolar disorder (PBD). Understanding the neurocognitive underpinnings of these interacting cognitive constructs might facilitate the discovery of more effective pro-cognitive interventions. Therefore, we employed a paradigm designed for jointly studying attentional control and WM encoding. METHODS We used a visuospatial change-detection task using four Gabor Patches with differing orientations in 63 euthymic PBD and 76 healthy controls (HCS), which investigated attentional competition during WM encoding. To manipulate bottom-up attention using stimulus salience, two Gabor patches flickered, which were designated as either targets or distractors. To manipulate top-down attention, the Gabor patches were preceded by either a predictive or a non-predictive cue for the target locations. RESULTS Across all task conditions, PBD stored significantly less information in visual WM than HCS (significant effect of group). However, we observed no significant group by salience or group by cue interactions. This indicates that impaired WM was not caused by deficits in attentional control. CONCLUSIONS Our results imply that while WM is disturbed in PBD, attentional prioritization of salient targets and distractors as well as the utilization of external top-down cues were not compromised. Consequently, the control of attentional selection appears be intact. These findings provide important constraints for models of WM dysfunction in PBD by indicating that later stages of WM encoding are likely primarily impaired. We also demonstrate that selective attention is not among the main sources of cognitive impairment in PBD. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.