1 School of Psychology, The University of Sydney , Sydney, New South Wales, Australia .
2 ARC Center of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders , Sydney, New South Wales, Australia .
J Neurotrauma. 2018 Sep 1;35(17):2036-2043. doi: 10.1089/neu.2017.5250. Epub 2018 Jun 12.
Imagining future events is thought to rely on recombination and integration of past episodic memory traces into future events. Future and past events contain episodic and nonepisodic details. Children with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) were found to have impaired recall of past episodic (but not semantic) event details. Here, we examined whether severe TBI impairs construction of future events. Children with severe TBI (n = 15) and healthy controls (NC; n = 33) 1) completed tests of anterograde (narrative and relational) memory and executive skills, 2) recalled past events and generated future events, and 3) rated events' phenomenological qualities. Events were scored for episodic (internal) and semantic (external) details. The groups did not differ in generating details of future events, although children with TBI recalled significantly fewer past internal (but not external) events' details relative to NCs. Moreover, the number of past internal details relative to future internal details was significantly higher in the NC group, but not in the TBI groups. Significant correlations between past and future were found for 1) internal details in both groups and 2) external details in the NC group. The TBI group rated their events as being less significant than did the NC group. The groups did not differ on ratings of visual intensity and rehearsal. Our study has shown that children who have sustained severe TBI had impoverished recall of past, but not generation of future, events. This unexpected dissociation between past and future event construction requires further research.
人们认为想象未来事件依赖于将过去的情景记忆痕迹重组和整合到未来事件中。未来和过去的事件包含情景和非情景细节。研究发现，患有严重创伤性脑损伤（TBI）的儿童对过去情景事件细节的回忆受损，但对过去语义事件细节的回忆没有受损。在这里，我们研究了严重 TBI 是否会影响未来事件的构建。我们对 15 名患有严重 TBI 的儿童（TBI 组）和 33 名健康对照（NC 组）进行了以下测试：1）进行顺行（叙事和关系）记忆和执行技能测试；2）回忆过去的事件并生成未来的事件；3）对事件的现象学质量进行评分。事件被分为情景（内部）和语义（外部）细节。这两个组在生成未来事件的细节方面没有差异，尽管 TBI 儿童回忆过去内部（但不是外部）事件的细节明显少于 NC 组。此外，NC 组过去内部细节与未来内部细节的数量显著高于 TBI 组，但 TBI 组之间没有差异。在两组中，过去和未来的内部细节之间存在显著相关性，而在 NC 组中，过去和未来的外部细节之间也存在显著相关性。TBI 组对其事件的评价比 NC 组认为其事件的意义更小。两组在视觉强度和排练评分上没有差异。我们的研究表明，患有严重 TBI 的儿童对过去事件的回忆受损，但对未来事件的生成没有影响。这种过去和未来事件构建之间的意外分离需要进一步研究。
