Event Processing and Memory Deficits Associated with PTSD

This project contains materials from two papers that studied event processing in a group of people diagnosed with post posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and matched controls:

Pitts, B. L., Eisenberg, M. L., Bailey, H. R., & Zacks, J. M. (2022). PTSD is associated with impaired event processing and memory for everyday events. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 7(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-022-00386-6

Current theories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) propose that memory abnormalities are central to the development and persistence of symptoms. While the most notable memory disturbances in PTSD involve memory for the trauma itself, individuals often have trouble remembering aspects of everyday life. Further, people with PTSD may have difficulty segmenting ongoing activity into discrete units, which is important for our perception and later memory of the activity. The current study investigated whether PTSD diagnosis and symptom severity predicted event segmentation and memory for everyday activities. To do so, 63 people with PTSD and 64 controls with a trauma history watched, segmented, and recalled videos of everyday activities. Viewers with higher PTSD symptom severity showed lower agreement on locations of event boundaries and recalled fewer fine-grained actions than did those with lower symptom severity. These results suggest that PTSD symptoms alter event segmentation, which may contribute to subsequent memory disturbances.

Pitts, B. L., Eisenberg, M. L., Bailey, H. R., & Zacks, J. M. (2023). Cueing natural event boundaries improves memory in people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 8(1), 26. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00478-x

People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often report difficulty remembering information in their everyday lives. Recent findings suggest that such difficulties may be due to PTSD-related deficits in parsing ongoing activity into discrete events, a process called event segmentation. Here, we investigated the causal relationship between event segmentation and memory by cueing event boundaries and evaluating its effect on subsequent memory in people with PTSD. People with PTSD (n = 38) and trauma-matched controls (n = 36) watched and remembered videos of everyday activities that were either unedited, contained visual and auditory cues at event boundaries, or contained visual and auditory cues at event middles. PTSD symptom severity varied substantial within both the group with a PTSD diagnosis and the control group. Memory performance did not differ significantly between groups, but people with high symptoms of PTSD remembered fewer details from the videos than those with lower symptoms of PTSD. Both those with PTSD and controls remembered more information from the videos in the event boundary cue condition than the middle cue or unedited conditions. This finding has important implications for translational work focusing on addressing everyday memory complaints in people with PTSD.

本课题汇集了两篇论文的研究材料，旨在探讨一组被诊断为创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）的患者及其匹配对照者在事件处理方面的状况。

Pitts, B. L.，Eisenberg, M. L.，Bailey, H. R.，& Zacks, J. M.（2022）的研究指出，PTSD与事件处理和日常事件的记忆障碍密切相关。当前关于PTSD的理论认为，记忆异常是症状形成与持续的核心。尽管PTSD中最显著的记忆障碍涉及对创伤本身的记忆，但个体往往难以回忆起日常生活的细节。此外，PTSD患者可能在将连续活动分割成独立单元方面存在困难，这对于我们的感知和后续活动记忆至关重要。本研究旨在探究PTSD的诊断和症状严重程度是否预测了事件分割和日常活动的记忆。为此，63名PTSD患者和64名具有创伤史的控制组观看了、分割并回忆了日常活动的视频。结果显示，症状严重程度较高的PTSD患者在对事件边界位置的一致性上表现较差，且回忆出的细粒度动作少于症状较轻的患者。这些结果表明，PTSD症状会改变事件分割，这可能导致后续的记忆障碍。

Pitts, B. L.，Eisenberg, M. L.，Bailey, H. R.，& Zacks, J. M.（2023）的研究进一步探讨了事件分割与记忆之间的因果关系。通过提示事件边界并评估其对PTSD患者后续记忆的影响，研究揭示了将活动分割成独立事件这一过程在PTSD患者中可能存在的缺陷。在研究中，38名PTSD患者和36名创伤匹配对照观看了未编辑、包含事件边界视觉和听觉提示，或包含事件中间视觉和听觉提示的日常活动视频。两组患者中PTSD症状严重程度均有显著差异。记忆表现两组之间无显著差异，但症状严重的PTSD患者比症状较轻的患者回忆出的视频细节更少。无论是PTSD患者还是对照组，在事件边界提示条件下回忆出的信息均多于中间提示或未编辑条件下。这一发现对于关注解决PTSD患者日常记忆投诉的转化研究具有重要意义。