Memory for Faces and Paired Associates After Temporal Lobectomy in Childhood

Abstract

Findings are reported from the first examination of the Beardsworth Memory for Children's Faces Test (BMCFT) (Beardsworth & Zaidel, 1994) tested on a selected sample of 10 left (LATL) and 7 right (RATL) anterior temporal lobectomy patients an average of 7 years post surgery. No differences between LATL and RATL groups were found on immediate or delayed memory trials of the BMCFT. Verbal memory was assessed with a verbal analogue of this test, the Extended Verbal Paired Associates Test (EVPAT) specifically constructed for this study. Differences were obtained on the immediate (F = 5.17; p < .01) and delayed (F = 6.55; p < .01) memory trials of the EVPAT with LATL patients learning and retrieving fewer verbal associations than their right ATL counterparts. No differences were found on the memory decline to delayed recall scores on the EVPAT. The findings suggest that people who have left or right ATL in childhood cannot be distinguished on the basis of their immediate or delayed memory for paired faces an average of 7 years post-surgery. These results are consistent with the immediate memory performance of children 6 months post-surgery as reported by Beardsworth and Zaidel (1994), but are not consonant with the delayed memory performance of their children on this task. This indicates that left-right dissociations found in children on measures of delayed memory for faces 6 months post-surgery may represent a component of memory that is still in a state of recovery. The findings for the immediate memory trials of the EVPAT conformed to expectations and underscore the dependability of simple rote verbal memory tasks in dissociating left from right ATL 7 years post-surgery. The study addresses the issue of the recovery of immediate versus delayed memory and time of assessment post-surgery.