Traumatic stress is linked to a deficit in associative episodic memory

Abstract

Individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are haunted by persistent memories of the trauma, but ironically are impaired in memories of daily life. The current set of 4 experiments compared new learning and memory of emotionally neutral content in 2 groups of patients and aged- and education-matched controls: 20 patients diagnosed with chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and 20 patients diagnosed with acute stress disorder (ASD). In all experiments, participants studied a list of stimuli pairs (words or pictures) and were then tested for their memory of the items, or for the association between items in each pair. Results indicated that both types of patients showed associative memory impairment compared to a control group, although their item memory performance was relatively intact. Potential mechanisms underlying such associative memory deficits in posttraumatic patients are discussed.

Proactive interference and concurrent inhibitory processes do not differentially affect item and associative recognition: Implication for the age-related associative memory deficit

“…First, performance on the item recognition test was significantly better than on the associative recognition one. Such results replicate previous finding regarding young and middle-age adults (e.g., Guez et al, 2011;Naveh-Benjamin, Guez, Kilb, et al, 2004). Second, the excitation and interference manipulations did cause enhancement and reduction in performance, respectively, in comparison to the neutral stimuli, indicating the success of these manipulations.…”

Reduced Corpus‐Callosum Volume in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Highlights the Importance of Interhemispheric Connectivity for Associative Memory

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Memory deficits are a common complaint of patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite vivid trauma-related memory, previous studies report memory impairment for nontrauma-related stimuli when compared to controls, specifically in associative memory (Guez et al, 2011). Healthy individuals show hemispheric memory asymmetry with left-prefrontal lateralization of encoding and rightprefrontal lateralization of episodic retrieval, suggesting a role for interhemispheric communication in memory-related tasks (Gazzaniga, 2000;Ringo, Doty, Demeter, & Simard, 1994).

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Neural Dysregulation in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

“…These symptoms have been linked to deficits in attentional control (2–4), threat sensitivity (5–7), episodic memory (8–10), and fear extinction (11, 12), functions subserved by cortico-subcortical circuits involving amygdala, insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and hippocampus (13, 14). While the activation patterns of these regions have been examined extensively in the past, identifying dysregulated patterns of connectivity between these regions could shed important and unique light on the brain-basis of PTSD (15, 16), and on previously unexplained mechanisms of PTSD symptom development.…”