TY - JOUR
T1 - Effects of penetrating traumatic brain injury on event segmentation and memory
AU - Zacks, Jeffrey M.
AU - Kurby, Christopher A.
AU - Landazabal, Claudia S.
AU - Krueger, Frank
AU - Grafman, Jordan
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was conducted by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Intramural Research Program and took place at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Research Center. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government. For further information about the Vietnam Head Injury Study, contact J.G. at jgrafman@northwestern.edu . We thank the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center for the provision of their facilities and for their supportive services. We thank Sandra Bonifant, Michael Tierney, Leila Glass, Lyanne Yozawitz, Carolee Noury, Vivien YJ Tsen, and Anne Leopold who worked tirelessly to test subjects and organize the study. We thank Yinyuan Zheng for assistance with data coding. As always, the authors are grateful to all of the Vietnam veterans and caregivers who participated in this study. Their unending commitment to improving the health care of veterans is the reason this study could be completed. CAK's contribution was supported in part by training grant T32AG000030 . JMZ's contribution was supported in part by grants R01MH070674 and R01AG031150 .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd.
PY - 2016/1/1
Y1 - 2016/1/1
N2 - Penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI) is associated with deficits in cognitive tasks including comprehension and memory, and also with impairments in tasks of daily living. In naturalistic settings, one important component of cognitive task performance is event segmentation, the ability to parse the ongoing stream of behavior into meaningful units. Event segmentation ability is associated with memory performance and with action control, but is not well assessed by standard neuropsychological assessments or laboratory tasks. Here, we measured event segmentation and memory in a sample of 123 male military veterans aged 59-81 who had suffered a traumatic brain injury as young men, and 34 demographically similar controls. Participants watched movies of everyday activities and segmented them to identify fine-grained or coarse-grained events, and then completed tests of recognition memory for pictures from the movies and of memory for the temporal order of actions in the movies. Lesion location and volume were assessed with computed tomography (CT) imaging. Patients with traumatic brain injury were impaired on event segmentation. Those with larger lesions had larger impairments for fine segmentation and also impairments for both memory measures. Further, the degree of memory impairment was statistically mediated by the degree of event segmentation impairment. There was some evidence that lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) selectively impaired coarse segmentation; however, lesions outside of a priori regions of interest also were associated with impaired segmentation. One possibility is that the effect of vmPFC damage reflects the role of prefrontal event knowledge representations in ongoing comprehension. These results suggest that assessment of naturalistic event comprehension can be a valuable component of cognitive assessment in cases of traumatic brain injury, and that interventions aimed at event segmentation could be clinically helpful.
AB - Penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI) is associated with deficits in cognitive tasks including comprehension and memory, and also with impairments in tasks of daily living. In naturalistic settings, one important component of cognitive task performance is event segmentation, the ability to parse the ongoing stream of behavior into meaningful units. Event segmentation ability is associated with memory performance and with action control, but is not well assessed by standard neuropsychological assessments or laboratory tasks. Here, we measured event segmentation and memory in a sample of 123 male military veterans aged 59-81 who had suffered a traumatic brain injury as young men, and 34 demographically similar controls. Participants watched movies of everyday activities and segmented them to identify fine-grained or coarse-grained events, and then completed tests of recognition memory for pictures from the movies and of memory for the temporal order of actions in the movies. Lesion location and volume were assessed with computed tomography (CT) imaging. Patients with traumatic brain injury were impaired on event segmentation. Those with larger lesions had larger impairments for fine segmentation and also impairments for both memory measures. Further, the degree of memory impairment was statistically mediated by the degree of event segmentation impairment. There was some evidence that lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) selectively impaired coarse segmentation; however, lesions outside of a priori regions of interest also were associated with impaired segmentation. One possibility is that the effect of vmPFC damage reflects the role of prefrontal event knowledge representations in ongoing comprehension. These results suggest that assessment of naturalistic event comprehension can be a valuable component of cognitive assessment in cases of traumatic brain injury, and that interventions aimed at event segmentation could be clinically helpful.
KW - Event perception
KW - Memory
KW - Traumatic brain injury
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cortex.2015.11.002
DO - 10.1016/j.cortex.2015.11.002
M3 - Article
C2 - 26704077
AN - SCOPUS:84949895735
SN - 0010-9452
VL - 74
SP - 233
EP - 246
JO - Cortex
JF - Cortex
ER -