HIPPOCAMPAL DYSFUNCTION AND CONTEXTUAL MEMORY: NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR UNDERSTANDING THE ETIOLOGY OF POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

Abstract

Recently, several studies indicate that hippocampal dysfunction play an important role in the etiology of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Specifically, it has been suggested that dysfunction of the hippocampus impairs the ability to encode and retrieve contextual information necessary to generate a conjunctive memory (holistic) of the different elements of the context or environment in which trauma occurred. Instead, PTSD patients encoded independent associations between individual elements of the context and the traumatic event. Thus, in PTSD an individual element by itself may be able to activate a memory