Abnormal temporal prediction relates to psychomotor retardation in major depressive disorder

Major depressive disorder (MDD) exhibits psychomotor retardation which concerns abnormal slowness of both thoughts and movements. In the current study, we investigated whether such psychomotor disturbance also disrupts the MDD subjects’ ability to synchronize their movements to a rhythmic tone sequence. We found that the timing between finger taps and tones is altered for MDD subjects (N=38), compared with healthy controls (N=65), mainly when tones are presented at a low frequency below 1 Hz. No differences, however, are observed in terms of the tapping speed, tapping stability, and tapping interval. Auditory-motor desynchronization in the low frequency range (< 1Hz) is associated with depression severity as well as with the degrees of both psychomotor anhedonia and vegetative symptoms (using the Beck Depression Inventory). In sum, our study demonstrates a frequency-specific auditory-motor synchronization deficit in MDD which also relates to psychomotor retardation. This suggests disruption of the cognitive capacity of temporal prediction for low-frequency auditory-motor synchronization in MDD. That supports a cognitive and therefore psychomotor over a motor view of psychomotor retardation in MDD.