Objective:

To compare the performance in episodic memory evaluated with neutral and emotional stimuli in patients with a history of traumatic brain injury and a control group.

Method:

This research had a non-experimental quantitative methodology, it was a quasi-experimental study of descriptive scope of comparison between groups; the group with a history was made up of 15 patients from the Hospital Universitario del Valle in the city of Cali, of which 8 were men and 7 women; the control group consisted of 15 participants: 5 men and 10 women. Episodic memory with emotional and neutral stimuli was assessed with the Auditory-Visual Emotional Memory Test and the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT), respectively.

Results:

Statistically significant differences were found in most of the episodic memory subtests evaluated with neutral stimuli, at the level of storage, interference, short- and long-term memory, and semantic false positives; Regarding the memory evaluated with emotional stimuli, significant differences were identified in encoding and recall.

Conclusion:

There is evidence of a lower performance of patients with TBI in memory storage with neutral stimuli, which influences their low score in recall, in relation to the emotional they present a lower performance in the ability to estimate the value or general emotional weight of the story, which seems to influence proper encoding.