BACKGROUND: Suicide is known to be closely related to depression, which is accompanied by cognitive decline.
OBJECTIVE: This study examined whether memory performance and cortical networking differ between high suicide risk and control groups depending on task difficulty.
METHODS: The participants were 28 high school students consisting of 14 suicide risk and 14 control subjects. Real-time electroencephalography signals were collected during a working memory task. Inter- and intrahemispheric coherences were analyzed.
RESULTS: Higher cortical networking during memory encoding was found in suicide risk adolescents compared to the control group. An increase in task difficulty heightened interhemispheric coherence.
CONCLUSIONS: Higher cortical networking in suicide risk adolescents seems to reflect activation of compensatory mechanisms in an attempt to minimize behavioral decline.