Impairments in prospective and retrospective memory following stroke

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to carry out a planned intention at a future time. We studied PM deficits in a group of community-dwelling stroke survivors compared with normal controls. Twelve stroke patients and 12 matched controls performed a series of tests assessing executive function, prospective (PM) and retrospective memory (RM). Patients performed less well than controls on laboratory measures of PM and associative RM; they also showed deficits on standard tests of RM and executive control. The groups did not differ on more structured clinical measures of executive function, RM, PM or self-rated PM and RM. The results are discussed in terms of an impairment in the ability to ‘self-initiate’ effortful cognitive processes.

Keywords:

• Stroke
• Prospective memory
• Cognition
• Executive function
• Retrospective memory

This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2006-013-E00133) to H. J. Kim and by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to F. I. M. Craik. We also wish to thank HeeSun Lim for research assistance.

Notes

¹The group × covariate interaction was significant F(1, 20) = 5.04, p < .05, showing that the assumption of homogeneous regression slope for ANCOVA was violated. However, the violation of assumption has little effect on the conclusion from ANCOVA when the group sizes are equal (Hamilton, 1977). So it seems safe to conclude that the patient and control groups differed after controlling for associative memory performance.