Abstract
People with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often report difficulties with attention and memory on tasks that are unrelated to their trauma. One important component of everyday event comprehension is the segmentation of ongoing activity into meaningful events. The present study asked whether PTSD symptom severity was associated with impaired segmentation and memory for neutral, ongoing activity. A sample of 137 participants, ages 21-79, completed event segmentation and memory tasks, general cognitive functioning tasks, and questionnaires assessing PTSD symptom severity. People with higher levels of PTSD symptoms had poorer event segmentation and event memory performance. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses demonstrated that PTSD symptom severity explained unique variance in event segmentation performance, even after controlling for general cognitive function. These results suggest that interventions aimed at improving event comprehension may help compensate for memory disruptions in PTSD.
Highlights
People with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often report difficulties with attention and memory on tasks that are unrelated to their trauma
The present study asked whether PTSD symptom severity is negatively associated with comprehension and memory of ongoing, naturalistic activity
Though people with PTSD may be hyper-attentive to components of the environment that are reminiscent of their traumatic event, this likely comes at a cost to their ability to pay attention to other features of the environment
Summary
People with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often report difficulties with attention and memory on tasks that are unrelated to their trauma. People with PTSD often report impairments in attention and memory on tasks that are not directly related to their traumatic event, such as difficulty remembering a phone number or following a conversation These symptoms can severely interfere with daily functioning, often limiting a person’s ability to work, raise a family, and participate in other activities of daily life [3]. Because the novel stimuli used in this study were unpredictable (rare stimuli that repeated over the course of a task were more predictable than completely novel stimuli), this study suggests that people with PTSD react with hypervigilance to unpredicted novel stimuli, even when those stimuli are not inherently threatening The results of these studies suggest that this constant alertness could disrupt people’s comprehension of non-trauma related ongoing activity
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