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PTSD Memory Deficits Bias Towards Pattern Completion Strategies of Negative Stimuli in Ambiguous Situations

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Jaime Garcia Quiles¹ (), Ellee Quattrocki, Norman Schmidt, Molly Hermiller; ¹Florida State University

Background: PTSD is a debilitating mental health condition marked by persistent emotional and memory disturbances following trauma. Emerging literature suggests these memory disturbances reflect an overreliance on pattern completion strategies, at the expense of pattern separation. This bias may contribute to PTSD by misinterpreting neutral cues as threatening, evidenced by attentional biases in eyetracking experiments. While prior studies have examined responses to clearly positive or negative cues, few have investigated how PTSD affects memory and perception when presented in ambiguous circumstances, mimicking common life situations. Method: A preliminary sample of PTSD (n = 13), subsyndromal PTSD (n=17) and healthy controls (n=23) individuals completed an eyetracking paradigm in which a series of images began in identical starting positions and resolved into either positive or negative outcomes. Participants were later presented with the positive or negative outcomes and asked to recreate the pattern of images that were studied. Growth mixture modeling was used to test success thresholds in detecting positive and negative outcomes. Results: Results indicated that PTSD participants had lower recall accuracy (t=3.05, p < .01), with greater negative recall and worse positive recall compared to subsyndromal and healthy control groups. Conclusions: Findings suggest that PTSD is characterized by heightened pattern completion and impaired pattern separation, particularly for negatively valenced material. This bias may underlie overgeneralized threat responses and difficulty distinguishing safe from dangerous cues in ambiguous contexts. This can inform future interventions to help mitigate trauma-related memory deficits.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions