Enhancing real-world event memory and well-being in individuals with transient epileptic amnesia using a smartphone-based intervention

Poster Session D - Monday, April 15, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Bryan Hong¹ (bryan.hong@mail.utoronto.ca), Miranda Chang^1,2, Katrina Thornber³, Eliza McCann¹, Adam Zeman⁴, Christopher Butler³, Morgan Barense^1,5; ¹University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, ²Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, ³Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom, ⁴University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom, ⁵Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, Canada

The ability to remember past experiences plays a critical function in our lives, and its loss can have a profound impact on quality of life and well-being. Transient epileptic amnesia (TEA) is a subtype of temporal lobe epilepsy characterized by hippocampal abnormalities and interictal memory complaints, including accelerated long-term forgetting and autobiographical amnesia. We developed HippoCamera, a smartphone-based intervention that guides participants to record and replay high-fidelity memory cues for daily events using principles from memory science. Previous work has demonstrated robust and long-lasting benefits to episodic recollection in healthy older adults following repeated reactivation of real-world memories using HippoCamera, accompanied by increased pattern differentiation in hippocampal activity. Here, we investigated whether these memory benefits extended to individuals with TEA, who experience impairments in autobiographical memory retention. Patients with TEA and matched healthy controls, recruited from The Impairment of Memory in Epilepsy (TIME) database, used HippoCamera for 5.5 weeks. For the first three weeks, participants recorded two events daily—as a within-subject comparison, recorded cues were assigned to either a “replayed” condition, where they were replayed over the entire study, or a “baseline” condition, where they were never replayed. Using a modified Autobiographical Interview task, we found that participants had improved episodic recollection for “replayed” events relative to “baseline” events. Further, following study completion, participants reported positive changes in psychosocial factors, such as self-concept and confidence. The present work reflects the first autobiographical memory intervention in TEA and demonstrates how HippoCamera can benefit memory and well-being for individuals experiencing memory impairments.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic