PERCEPTUAL IMPLICIT MEMORY FOR TRAUMA-RELATED INFORMATION IN POSTTRAUMATIC-STRESS-DISORDER

We used a perceptual identification paradigm to investigate whether Vi etnam combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), comp ared to healthy combat veterans, exhibit an implicit memory bias for t rauma-related information. Subjects viewed a series of trauma, positiv e, and neutral words, and subsequently saw these ''old'' words intermi xed with an equivalent number of ''new'' distracter words of the same types. During this test phase, each word appeared for 100 milliseconds and was replaced by a visual mask. Although both groups exhibited imp licit memory by accurately identifying more old words than new words, this priming effect was not enhanced for trauma words in the PTSD grou p. Tasks that primarily tap perceptual implicit memory may be relative ly insensitive to emotional variables.