Schedule of Events | Symposia

General Semantic, Personal Semantic and Episodic Details when Thinking about the Past and the Future in Moderate-to-Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Natalia Rivera¹ (natalia.b.rivera@vumc.org), Suhaah Nadir², Sharice Clough³, Louis Renoult⁴, Melissa C. Duff¹, Annick F.N. Tanguay¹; ¹Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, United States, ²Vanderbilt University College of Arts & Sciences, Nashville, TN, United States, ³Multimodal Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Gelderland, The Netherlands, ⁴School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom

Relational memory supports the binding of the arbitrary relations between elements of experience to create durable representations of our lives over time, an ability that is compromised following Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). While much of the work on relational memory in TBI comes from studies on episodic memory, recent work suggests relational memory is also recruited in support of representations of general semantics (i.e., knowledge of the world) and personal semantics (i.e., knowledge of the self). We assessed if the effect of TBI on relational memory extends beyond episodic memory to include aspects of general and personal semantics. Thirty individuals with moderate-severe TBI and 30 non-injured participants (NCs) generated narratives across life chapters (adolescence, pre-injury, post-injury, future) across three conditions: General semantics (GS), personal semantics (PS), and episodic memory (EM). A mixed effects model revealed a significant effect of group, p=.001; TBIs generated fewer details than NCs across all chapters and conditions (GS: TBI [M=24.64 , SE=1.89]; NC [M=37.76 , SE=2.99]; PS: TBI [M=56.91 , SE=4.98]; NC [M=64.62, SE=3.90]; EM: TBI [M=45.78, SE=3.64]; NC [M=68.78, SE=4.18]). The effects of TBI on relational memory extend beyond episodic memory to include aspects of semantic memory for both the past and future. Despite widespread deficits, ad hoc explorative analyses suggest PS memory may be a relative strength in TBI. Future analyses of “self” representations in TBI are warranted. These findings provide additional evidence for the role of relational memory in support of semantic memory and expands the memory deficit profile in TBI.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Other