List-learning and verbal memory profiles in childhood epilepsy syndromes

- Children with epilepsy have more widespread memory impairment with patterns of deficits related to seizure syndrome.
- Greater retroactive interference effects were found in TLE, while poorer learning efficiency was found in FLE.
- Higher prevalence of extreme contrast indices was identified in the current sample versus the CVLT-C standardization sample.

Findings of material-specific influences on memory performance in pediatric epilepsy are inconsistent and merit further investigation. This study compared 90 children (aged 6 years to 16 years) with childhood absence epilepsy (CAE), frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE), and temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) to determine whether they displayed distinct list-learning and verbal memory profiles on the California Verbal Learning Test - Children's Version (CVLT-C). Group comparison identified greater risk of memory impairment in children with TLE and FLE syndromes but not for those with CAE. While children with TLE performed worst overall on Short Delay Free Recall, groups with TLE and FLE performed similarly on Long Delay Free Recall. Contrast indices were then employed to explore these differences. Children with TLE demonstrated a significantly greater retroactive interference (RI) effect compared with groups with FLE and CAE. Conversely, children with FLE demonstrated a significantly worse learning efficiency index (LEI), which compares verbal memory following repetition with initial recall of the same list, than both children with TLE and CAE. These findings indicated shallow encoding related to attentional control for children with FLE and retrieval deficits in children with TLE. Finally, our combined sample showed significantly higher rates of extreme contrast indices (i.e., 1.5 SD difference) compared with the CVLT-C standardization sample. These results underscore the high prevalence of memory dysfunction in pediatric epilepsy and offer support for distinct patterns of verbal memory performance based on childhood epilepsy syndrome.