VolverAccelerated forgetting in temporal lobe epilepsy: When does it occur?
Israel Contador, Abraham Sánchez, Michael D. Kopelman, Jesús González de la Aleja, Pablo Ruisoto, Accelerated forgetting in temporal lobe epilepsy: When does it occur?, Cortex, Volume 141, 2021, Pages 190-200, ISSN 0010-9452, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.03.035.
Resumen
Objective: The main goal of the study was to analyse differences in the forgetting rates of
Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) patients at different intervals (30 sec, 10 min, 1 day and 1
week) compared with those of healthy controls. A secondary aim of this research was to
provide an assessment of the relationship between clinical epilepsy-related variables and
forgetting rates in TLE patients.
Method: The sample was composed of 14 TLE patients and 14 healthy matched controls. All
participants underwent a full standardised neuropsychological assessment including
general intelligence, executive functioning, memory, language and other variables, such as
depression, anxiety or everyday memory failures. Two specific memory tasks, consisting of
cued recall of 4 short stories and 4 routes, were carried out at four different intervals.
Results: There was a significant difference between groups at 10-min interval on the stories
task, with the TLE group displaying greater forgetting than healthy controls. None of the
other intervals on either task showed significant group differences. No differences were
found when controlling for clinical epilepsy-related variables.
Conclusion: Forgetting of verbal information at 10 min was greater in patients with TLE
compared with controls, but accelerated longer term forgetting was not found. This study
suggests that a late consolidation process is not necessarily impaired in TLE patients.