Memory performance during the intracarotid amobarbital procedure and neuropsychological assessment in medial temporal lobe epilepsy: the limits of material specificity.

We investigated the relationship between material-specific memory performance elicited during the Wada test, or intracarotid amobarbital procedure (IAP), and classic neuropsychological assessment in 89 surgical candidates with refractory medial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE). The neuropsychological battery included measures of simple and complex verbal and visual memory, whereas the IAP material consisted of verbal and dually encodable stimuli. Neuropsychological testing revealed that reduced verbal memory performance was associated with left-sided MTLE, whereas visual memory tasks revealed no differences between patients with left-sided and right-sided MTLE. During IAP, memory performance was worse with the ipsilesional hemisphere, regardless of lesion side. Most importantly, performance on verbal memory tests was significantly, but moderately, correlated with left hemispheric IAP performance, indicating that memory tasks using verbal material are a valid marker of left hemispheric integrity in left language-dominant MTLE patients and significantly predict left hemispheric memory performance during IAP. In contrast, performance on classic visual memory tests is unrelated to right hemispheric IAP performance, suggesting that the currently used visual memory stimuli do not reflect right hemispheric sensitivity.