Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Using EEG to test the impact of attention deficits on memory performance in cancer-related cognitive dysfunction

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Alexandra Gaynor¹, James Root², Pangzhongyuan Pei³, Dishari Azad⁴, Maria Estelle^1,2, Isabella Mohr², Tim Ahles², Jennifer Mangels^4,5; ¹Montclair State University, ²Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, ³Teachers College, Columbia University, ⁴The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, ⁵Baruch College, The City University of New York

More than half of cancer survivors report struggles with “forgetting” information from long-term memory, but traditional neuropsychological tests often fail to detect these subtle memory deficits. Previous work has shown that survivors demonstrate atypical event-related potentials (ERPs) related to early attentional gating, suggesting what survivors report as “forgetting” may actually stem from attention difficulties that impact encoding. The present study examined whether memory deficits in cancer-related cognitive dysfunction (CRCD) are exacerbated under distraction, and whether these deficits are associated with changes in ERPs at encoding previously associated with attention and subsequent memory. EEG was recorded while breast cancer survivors (BCS; n=23) and non-cancer controls (NCC; n=23) completed 6 study-test runs of a verbal old/new recognition task. Half of runs included an auditory distractor during encoding. Participants gave memory confidence (metamemory) ratings for each item at study and test to examine whether poor subjective awareness of memory accounts for survivors’ tendency to mischaracterize encoding deficits as retrieval problems. Data analyses are ongoing. We hypothesize that the effect of distraction on the amplitude of attention-related ERPs, including those that predict subsequent memory (i.e., P3/LPC, sustained frontal waveforms), will be greater for BCS than NCC. We also expect BCS to have poorer metamemory accuracy than NCC, suggesting difficulty detecting attentional failures in real time. Results of this study will elucidate the relationship between attention and memory dysfunction in CRCD, and whether survivors demonstrate deficits in awareness which would pose a challenge for current methods of remediation.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic