De. Fleck et al., Directed forgetting deficits in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy: An information processing perspective, J INT NEURO, 5(6), 1999, pp. 549-555
Citations number
29
Categorie Soggetti
Neurology
Journal title
JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Although mesial temporal lobe brain damage is frequently associated with me
mory loss, it is unclear whether the deficit results entirely from a disrup
tion in the processing of relevant information or whether it also reflects
interference from irrelevant information. Directed forgetting is one proced
ure that can be used, along with standard tests of memory, to investigate t
his distinction. Seventeen patients with a diagnosis of complex-partial sei
zures of temporal lobe origin and 17 healthy volunteers were compared on le
xical decision, free recall, and recognition tests in a directed-forgetting
paradigm. These tests created a memory profile to measure the influence of
task relevant and irrelevant information in implicit and explicit memory.
Compared with healthy volunteers, the patients were significantly impaired
on the memory tasks overall [F(5,25) = 5.01, p <.01]. Specifically, directe
d forgetting in lexical decision and recognition both discriminated between
the groups [stepdown F(1,26) = 6.84, eta(2) =.26, p <.05 and stepdown F(1,
25) = 5.36, eta(2) =.13, p <.05, respectively]. The results suggest that in
terictal memory performance in temporal lobe epilepsy may be disrupted in p
art because of a deficit in the differential processing of task relevant an
d task irrelevant information, particularly at retrieval.