School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
T. Y. Nelson Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, The Children's Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, Australia.
Epilepsy Behav. 2020 Dec;113:107471. doi: 10.1016/j.yebeh.2020.107471. Epub 2020 Nov 2.
Long-term memory, which is critical for social and vocational functioning, is impaired in children with genetic generalized epilepsy (GGE). In this study, we examined the relationship between the temporal pattern of long-term forgetting for visual and verbal materials and executive skills in children with GGE.
Thirty-two children, 17 with GGE and 25 typically developing age-matched controls completed standardized tests of short-term memory (recall after a 30-minute delay), executive skills, and experimental long-term memory tasks (one verbal and one visual) involving recall after one short (30-minute), and two long (1-day, 2-week) delays.
On the long-term visual memory task, children with GGE performed comparably with typically developing children at a 30-minute delay (p = .298), although obtained lower object placement accuracy score, at 1 day (p = .039) and at 2 weeks (p = .022) relative to typically developing children. On the verbal task, the between-group difference was not significant at any delay. In children with GGE, poorer object placement accuracy at two weeks correlated with lower visuospatial short-term memory (r = -0.624, p = .005) and verbal working memory (r = -0.448, p = .041).
This study provided several novel findings. For the first time, accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF) was found in long-term visual memory in children with GGE, despite comparable learning and recall at 30 min. Study results indicated that deficits in long-term visual memory are present after one day, increase over time, and may relate to reduced executive skills. Our findings can be used to inform our understanding of the temporal trajectory of ALF and contribution of executive skills.
长期记忆对社交和职业功能至关重要，而患有遗传性全面性癫痫（GGE）的儿童存在长期记忆损伤。在这项研究中，我们研究了 GGE 患儿的视觉和言语材料长期遗忘的时间模式与执行技能之间的关系。
32 名儿童，17 名患有 GGE，25 名年龄匹配的正常发育对照组完成了短期记忆（30 分钟延迟后回忆）、执行技能和实验性长期记忆任务（一项视觉和一项言语）的标准化测试，涉及 30 分钟（短期）、1 天（长期）和 2 周（长期）延迟后的回忆。
在长期视觉记忆任务中，GGE 患儿在 30 分钟延迟时与正常发育儿童表现相当（p=0.298），尽管在 1 天（p=0.039）和 2 周（p=0.022）时获得的物体放置准确性得分较低，与正常发育儿童相比。在言语任务中，两组间的差异在任何延迟时均无统计学意义。在 GGE 患儿中，2 周时物体放置准确性较差与较低的视空间短期记忆（r=-0.624，p=0.005）和言语工作记忆（r=-0.448，p=0.041）相关。
本研究提供了一些新的发现。首次发现 GGE 患儿的长期视觉记忆存在加速长期遗忘（ALF），尽管在 30 分钟时学习和回忆相似。研究结果表明，一天后长期视觉记忆缺陷出现，且随时间推移而增加，并且可能与执行技能降低有关。我们的发现可用于深入了解 ALF 的时间轨迹和执行技能的贡献。
