Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Philosophy (Ph.D)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

William Chaplin

Second Advisor

Marla J Hamberger

Third Advisor

Melissa Peckins

Abstract

Memory impairment is a common comorbidity of epilepsy, particularly in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) for whom the hippocampus and surrounding memory-dependent regions are directly involved in seizure activity. Sleep is known to facilitate memory consolidation processes; however, whether, or the extent to which, nocturnal seizures disrupt memory processes in TLE is unknown. Investigating the effect of nocturnal seizures on memory requires a task designed to assess memory in the morning for material learned the evening before a period of sleep, ideally over multiple days. Accordingly, we have created a psychometrically sound, word paired-associates (WPA) memory task with five alternate forms to assess overnight memory longitudinally. We selected comparable stimuli for the WPA task versions and piloted this task in a group of healthy controls. We subsequently began standardizing the task with healthy adults ages 18-55. We determined the feasibility and utility of the task procedure by administering the WPA task over three days to people with epilepsy admitted to an inpatient Epilepsy Monitoring Unit (EMU). Overall, we found that epilepsy patients performed poorer than healthy controls on the WPA task. We also examined the extent to which nocturnal seizures disrupted memory consolidation for these patients, and hypothesized that memory would be poorer in the morning following nights with nocturnal seizures compared to nights without seizures in a within-subjects design. Although a small sample size precluded statistical analysis, data trended towards poorer memory performance after nights with nocturnal seizures. Further development and standardization of this task will result in a public domain, multi-form, computerized memory task that can be used in epilepsy and other neurological disorders to assess overnight memory at multiple time points for clinical and research purposes.

Download

Included in

Psychology Commons

Share

COinS