Subjective and objective memory in a community-derived sample of people with epilepsy: Evidence from the crimes and four doors tests

Abstract

Subjective self-reports of difficulties with memory are relatively common in people with epilepsy, though these do not always align with performance on objective memory tasks. The current study gathered qualitative and quantitative subjective reports of memory function in a group of people with epilepsy who were recruited via the charity Epilepsy Action, along with controls. Participants also carried out one of two recently developed experimental tasks (Crimes or Four Doors) that provide objective measures of long-term memory and forgetting, along with an additional verbal learning and recall task, each of which assess retention over a one-week period. Relative to controls, people with epilepsy reported memory problems across all the subjective measures, while also showing more objective forgetting on Crimes and Four Doors. When combining the epilepsy and control samples, subjective forgetting and memory satisfaction correlated with objective delayed recall and forgetting. Within the epilepsy sample, delayed recall correlated with subjectively experienced forgetting. These findings provide new evidence for subjective and objective memory difficulties in epilepsy and indicate the need for development of appropriate tools to detect atypical forgetting in this population.