Event Segmentation and Memories of Daily Life after a Traumatic Brain Injury

Event segmentation agreement refers to the degree to which individuals divide the continuous flow of information into meaningful units of experience in the same way as others. In TBI patients, low levels of agreement have been reported and associated with poorer memory performance. However, this effect has been observed with laboratory tasks, and its impact on everyday memories remains unexplored. This study therefore investigated whether the ability to segment a short video predicted personal event memory in fifteen TBI patients and their matched controls. Memory was assessed using a recall of daily events collected through the experience sampling method. With this ecological task, TBI patients exhibited deficits in both the richness and accuracy of their personal memories, the latter being significantly predicted by their level of segmentation agreement. These preliminary findings highlight the role of event segmentation in everyday memory functioning, which could offer new avenues for rehabilitation memory programs.