Spatial Memory and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) can cause memory disorders, including long-term forgetfulness due to a failure to consolidate verbal but also spatial information. The forgetting phenomenon presented by these epileptic patients is called accelerated forgetting in the literature and remains difficult to objectify during cognitive assessments. It is indeed particularly complicated to evaluate long-term spatial memory and to account for the topographical complaint, although recurrent, of patients with this TLE. A navigation task being proposed as part of the neuropsychological assessment of patients with a spatial memory complaint, it is interesting to study the performance pattern of patients with TLE by comparing them to a group of control subjects matched in age and gender in order to verify whether there is significant long-term forgetting and whether there is a significant difference between Right TLE and Left TLE. Indeed, several studies have demonstrated this accelerated long-term forgetting in epileptic patients (Cassel et al., 2016; Lemesle et al., 2017; Landry et al., 2022; Blake et al., 2020) but few with a retention delay of several weeks (Tramoni et al., 2009). This study allows us to statistically analyze the effects of these two groups: epileptic patients and healthy volunteers, but also to combine the effect of the laterality of epilepsy specifically on spatial memory performance.