A Life Turned Upside Down: Exploring the Narrative Structure of the Memory for the Event Leading to a Moderate-to-Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Suhaah Nadir¹ (suhaah.nadir@vanderbilt.edu), Natalia Rivera², Daniela Palombo³, Melissa C. Duff², Annick F. N. Tanguay²; ¹Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Sciences, ²Vanderbilt University Medical Center, ³The University of British Columbia

Traumatic events are often recalled with greater detail than non-traumatic events. Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) are physically and psychologically traumatic events. An open question is if individuals with TBI produce greater details for their injury narratives given the increased likelihood of loss of consciousness and post-traumatic amnesia for the event. We recruited 30 individuals with chronic moderate-severe TBI who freely recalled their injury event. We developed a scoring protocol to examine narrative stages and defined “prologue” and “context” as stages leading up to the “core event” (i.e., the injury), distinguished by their relevancy/effect on the event. “Reflection” and “epilogue” contained details following the event, distinguished by temporal and spatial proximity. We have analyzed data from 15 participants to date and compared the narrative stages by the proportion of words dedicated to them. Stages representing core event (M=0.32, SD=0.25), reflection (M=0.25, SD=0.27), and context (M=0.21, SD=0.20) dominated the narrative. The remaining categories were lower comparatively (~0.07). Similar proportions of context and reflection to “core event” details may reflect individuals’ with TBI ongoing work to make sense of the event, its cause, and its immediate and ongoing repercussions. The stages representing lower narrative proportions suggest that, although participants often provide overarching context/take-away lessons, much of their memory surrounding their TBI is anchored in the temporal and spatial proximity to the event. Narrative scoring, combined with Autobiographical Interview scoring, will help to elucidate patterns of memory composition in autobiographical narratives by mapping semantic/episodic details across stages, in TBI and other neurological conditions.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic