Name: A Real-world What-Where-When Memory Test (Video) | JoVE Journal
Uploaded: 2017-05-16T14:00:00.000+00:00
Duration: 9 min 13 s
Description: Learn a novel episodic memory test assessing what-where-when recall across two occasions. This user-friendly method measures cognitive aging and helps researchers study memory-related disorders.

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5 minutes

Thank you to all the participants that have helped develop this methodology over different iterations of the task. Thank you also to all the students who helped by running the different iterations over the years: Natasha Dubes, Emma Denning, Victoria Bellhouse, Stephen Holland, Melissa Anderson, Katie Shaw, Sarah Morgan, Karla Butterworth, Michael Craig, Lauren Wray, Olivia Sanderson, Daniel Lai, Rajameenakshi Boopathy and Chun Kit Ho. This research was funded by Newcastle University's contributions to student research projects.

This protocol was approved by Newcastle University's Faculty of Medical Sciences Ethics Committee (approval number 515_1).
1. Preparation for the study
<ol>
	<li>Before running the study, gather 20 small, easily identified/described objects, e.g., 
	A tea light 
	A toy digger 
	A toy frog 
	A clothing hook 
	A spoon 
	A set of keys 
	A button 
	A lip balm 
	A toy snowman 
	A bottle cap 
	A die 
	A lighter 
	A comb 
	A wrist band 
	A padlock 
	A butterfly pin 
	A ruler 
	A guitar plectrum 
	A battery 
	A USB stick</li>
	<li>Randomly select 8 of these objects for the first session, and 8 for the second session. There should be 4 extra objects that are not used in either session. Once the objects have been selected, use the same objects in the same locations and in the same sessions for all participants.</li>
	<li>Make photographs of the 16 objects to be used. Make two sheets of these photographs: the first sheet for the first session (8 objects) and the second sheet for the second session (8 objects).
	<ol>
		<li>Put the images of the objects on the sheet in the order the participants need to find them. Number the images to avoid any confusion. Figure 1 shows an example.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
</ol>
<img alt="Object-based cognitive categorization experiment; two phases, distinct item arrays on table." class="xfigimg" src="/files/ftp_upload/55646/55646fig1.jpg" data-altupdatedat="1788250015000" data-alt="Figure 1"> 
Figure 1: Object identity sheets. These are the sheets that are placed next to the pile of 20 objects. The left-hand sheet is placed there in phase 1 and the right-hand sheet in phase 2. Participants are supposed to pick up the objects from the pile in the order indicated on the sheet. Note that in phase 2, all the objects from phase 1 have been collected up and added to the pile again, so that during phase 2, participants again search through a pile of 20 objects to start with. <a href="http://cloudfront.jove.com/files/ftp_upload/55646/55646fig1large.jpg" target="_blank">Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.</a>
<ol start="4">
	<li>Identify 16 hiding locations around the room. Ideally, the room is an office with many things in it. The locations should be unambiguously describable by a person not actually in the room. Also, try and make the locations not purely associated with a clear object in the room, as this reduces spatial memory to object-object associations.
	<ol>
		<li>Assign each object to one of the hiding locations, making sure that the locations used in the first and second session are randomly interspersed.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Make sure that the lay-out of the room will remain the same for the duration of the study. In multi-use rooms, make sure that the room can be put back in the same way before each participant.</li>
</ol>
2. Session 1
<ol>
	<li>Before the participant arrives, put the 20 objects in a pile in a fixed location in the testing room, with the object picture sheet for session 1 next to it. The reason for having participants find the objects in a pile using the picture sheets is to force them to pay attention to the identity of the objects.</li>
	<li>When the participant arrives, first give them an information leaflet explaining the study, talk them through the study, and have them read and sign the consent forms.</li>
	<li>Take the participants to the door of the testing room and give instructions about what they will need to do in the room. The instructions can be modified to either induce intentional memorization or incidental memorization.
	<ol>
		<li>For intentional memorization, read these instructions to the participant: 
		"The purpose of this task is for you to hide some objects in a room and you will be asked to remember them later. You will be presented with a pile of objects on the desk. Next to the pile you will find a sheet with pictures of the 8 objects that you must hide during this task. At the bottom left of each picture there is a number indicating the order in which you must hide these objects. 
		You may only pick up and hide one object at a time. I will point to the location where you should hide each object. Once you enter the room you should start counting seconds out loud and continue doing that until you leave the room. 
		Later in this study we will repeat this with different objects and different locations. After this you will be asked to remember what objects you hid, where you hid them and on which occasion. If you have any questions, please ask them now because you will not be able to once we enter the room. This is not a timed task, so please take as much time as you need."</li>
		<li>For incidental memorization, read these instructions to the participant: 
		"The purpose of this task is to test your multi-tasking abilities. You will need to count seconds out loud, without slowing down or skipping numbers, while I try to distract you with objects to look for and place in different places around the room. I will record your voice for later analysis of your counting. 
		For the distractor, you will be presented with a pile of objects on the desk. Next to the pile you will find a sheet with pictures of the 8 objects that you must hide during this task. At the bottom left of each picture there is a number indicating the order in which you must hide these objects. You may only pick up and hide one object at a time. I will point to the location where you should hide each object. Once you enter the room you should start counting seconds out loud and continue doing that until you leave the room. 
		Later in this study we will repeat this to test whether you get better with practice. If you have any questions, please ask them now because you will not be able to once we enter the room. This is not a timed task, so please take as much time as you need, but don't forget to keep the count going at a steady rate."</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Take the participant into the room and show the pile of objects. Have the participant find and take the first object. Indicate where the object needs to be placed, and have the participant place the object there.
	<ol>
		<li>Then have the participant go back for the next object, and so on for all 8 objects on the picture sheet. The timing is determined by the speed at which the participant finds and hides the objects. This typically takes no more than 2 minutes.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>At the end of the session, take the participant out of the room.</li>
</ol>
3. First break
<ol>
	<li>Between session 1 and session 2, leave approximately 2 hours. Ask participants to do different tasks during this interval, or ask them to go away (e.g. to have lunch) and to come back at the appointed time.</li>
	<li>Before the participant returns, remove all the hidden objects from the room and put them back in the pile.</li>
	<li>Replace the picture sheet with the picture sheet for session 2.</li>
</ol>
4. Session 2
<ol>
	<li>Remind the participant of the instructions given before session 1.</li>
	<li>Take the participant into the room, and repeat section 2.4, but now with different objects and locations. Again, the timing is determined by the participant.</li>
	<li>Take the participant back out of the room.</li>
</ol>
5. Second break
<ol>
	<li>Again instruct the participant to come back 2 h later or run another battery of tests during this interval.</li>
	<li>Remove all objects from their hiding places. The room will not be needed again for this participant.</li>
</ol>
6. Session 3
<ol>
	<li>If the participants had been instructed for incidental memorization, debrief them now and tell them the real purpose of the task. Check the effectiveness of the deceit by asking the participants if they suspected the task was a memory task.</li>
	<li>Ask them to freely recall which objects they had hidden in which locations and on which of the two occasions. Ask them to write this all down in the order in which they remember them. Encourage them to recall any information they can, including incomplete information (like remembering an object, but not its location, etc.).
	<ol>
		<li>Give the participants all the time they need to recall as much as they can. Allow them to draw a map or diagram if they so wish.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>After they have recalled all the information they can, ask them to complete the vividness scale and the task contemplation scale (Figure 2).</li>
</ol>
<img alt="Vividness and contemplation rating scales for memory assessment, evaluation chart." class="xfigimg" src="/files/ftp_upload/55646/55646fig2.jpg" data-altupdatedat="1788250015000" data-alt="Figure 2"> 
Figure 2: Subjective experience reporting. After reporting on their memory for objects, locations and phases, the participants are asked to complete these two scales, which report on the subjective experience of their memories (top scale) and on how much they actually rehearsed the material after each hiding phase. <a href="http://cloudfront.jove.com/files/ftp_upload/55646/55646fig2large.jpg" target="_blank">Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.</a>
<ol start="4">
	<li>Debrief participants further and send away.</li>
</ol>
7. Data extraction and analysis
<ol>
	<li>For the scoring sheet, create a list of all 16 objects, and another list of all 16 locations.
	<ol>
		<li>For each object and location, determine whether it was remembered in combination with the correct session and location/object (respectively; What-Where-When)), whether in combination only with the correct session (only What-When or only Where-When) or only with the correct location/object (respectively; only What-Where), or whether it was recalled correctly, but without any correct combination (only What and only Where). The number of correctly recalled What-Where-When combinations and What-Where combinations should match for both lists.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Analyze the full What-Where-When combinations first. Because there is a total of 16 combinations to be recalled, treat the number of actually correctly recalled combinations as coming from a binomial distribution (16 'yes-no' answers), which should be analyzed with a Generalized Linear Model, using a binomial distribution with log-link function.</li>
	<li>Then analyze the 3 incomplete combinations. To do this using the same analysis, analyze the total number of incompletely recalled combinations of each type out of the remaining number of combinations that were not correctly recalled as a complete what-where-when combination. For example, if a participant recalled 5 correct what-where-when combinations, then analyze incomplete combinations out of (16-5=) 11 possible incomplete combinations.</li>
	<li>Analyze the number of objects or locations recalled without any combination in an analogous way out of the remaining combinations that have not yet been accounted for.</li>
</ol>

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</ol>

The authors have nothing to disclose.

The data show that performance on other tasks which are supposed to measure episodic memory predicts performance on the Real-World What-Where-When memory task as well. However, these correlations are likely to represent a shared subset of cognitive abilities used by the different tasks. The Real-World What-Where-When memory task has the advantage over these other tasks in that it tests people&#39;s memory for two actual events which happened in a real spatio-temporal context. Unlike asking people about events from their ...

Episodic memory is memory for unique events from one&#39;s own past that are experienced as a reliving of the original event (mental time travel)1,2. It is also one of the first types of memory to be affected in the early stages of many forms of dementia3,4. The medial temporal lobe, and more specifically the hippocampus, is believed to be an important structure in the processing of episodic memories5, and therefore any conditions that affect hippocampal function, like aging and many mood disorders, are also believed to affect episodic memory function. As such, episodic memory function can be a useful biomarker for a range of neurological and psychiatric conditions6.
Methods for quantifying episodic memory, however, are still less than ideal. Real-world everyday episodic memories are integrative memories of unique events in their spatiotemporal context7, usually incidentally encoded4. The two most common methods used in both the clinic and in academic research are word list learning8 and recounting a story from one&#39;s own past3. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of the word lists over the story approach is that the assessor knows exactly what the right answers are. This is difficult to assess with spontaneous stories from the participant/patient&#39;s past, since often no objective evidence is available and even accounts from family members may have incorrect details in them. The advantage of the stories is that they actually assess the typical content and structure of episodic memories: events in spatiotemporal context, with information about What happened, Where and When bound together7. Word lists do not require any context to be recalled at all, and are often rehearsed several times (e.g. the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Task).
Recently, several attempts have been made to construct episodic memory tasks that combine the strengths of the two classical tests while minimizing the drawbacks9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22. The current protocol is the most recent version of a What-Where-When episodic memory test which has been developed at Newcastle University10,16,22. The concept is based on the work with non-human animals, started by Clayton and Dickinson23, and adapted for work with a range of other species24,25,26,27,28, some of which have confirmed the sensitivity of this paradigm to medial temporal lobe damage29. It is one of several attempts at incorporating a What-Where-When framework in episodic memory testing with adult humans18,20,30,31, but the only one to be performed in a real environment, without the use of computers, making it easy for participants/patients to engage with and low-cost to carry out.

<table><tbody><tr><td>&lt;strong&gt;Example Materials&lt;/strong&gt;</td><td></td><td></td><td>Any 20 easy-to-name small objects will do.</td></tr><tr><td>1 tea light</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 toy digger</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 toy frog</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 clothing hook</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 spoon</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 set of keys</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 button</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 lip balm</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 toy snowman</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 bottle cap</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 die</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 lighter</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 comb</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 wrist band</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 padlock</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 butterfly pin</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 ruler</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 guitar plectrum</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 battery</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>1 USB stick</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

a real-world what-where-when memory test

A Real-world What-Where-When Memory Test

Episodic memory is a complex memory system which allows recall and mental re-experience of previous episodes from one&#39;s own life. Real-life episodic memories are about events in their spatiotemporal context and are typically visuospatial, rather than verbal. Yet often, tests of episodic memory use verbal material to be recalled (word lists, stories). The Real-World What-Where-When memory test requires participants to hide a total of 16 different objects in 16 different locations over two temporal occasions, 2 h apart. Another two hours later, they are then asked to recall which objects (What) they had hidden in which locations (Where) and on which of the two occasions (When). In addition to counting the number of correctly recalled complete what-where-when combinations, this task can also be used to test real-world spatial memory and object memory. This task is sensitive to normal cognitive aging, and correlates well with performance on other episodic memory tasks, while at the same time providing more ecological validity and being cheap and easy to run.

Older people (65+) remember fewer complete What-Where-When combinations than do younger people (18-25; Χ2(1) = 9.5; p = 0.002; Figure 3). Note that although as a group, older people perform worse than younger people, there are some older people who perform as well or better than some young people. This variation may be informative if it is predictive of other conditions.
One can also inve...

The Real-World What-Where-When memory test is a novel episodic memory test, in which participants need to recall which objects have been hidden in which locations on which of two distinct occasions. It is easy to run and is sensitive to normal cognitive aging.

Episodic memory is a complex memory system which allows recall and mental re-experience of previous episodes from one&#39;s own life. Real-life episodic ...

Episodic memory is the memory for specific events from one's own life. Typically, this includes memory for the context in which the event took place, the spacial location where it took place, and many of the details of what or who was present during the event. Episodic memory performance is sensitive to many psychiatric and neurological disorders.It's often the first mental capacity to be affected in dementia, and is also believed to be diminished in depression and other affective disorders. Measuring episodic memory performance is therefore an important thing to do. Many laboratory and clinical tests of episodic memory require participants to memorize lists of words.Such lists do not have any context or spacial location in which the words need to be remembered, making them poor models for real episodic memory. Other tests ask participants or patients about real events from their own lives, however, in these tests, the experimenter or clinician does not have objective information against which to test the accuracy of the memories being recalled. We have devised an episodic memory test that includes the spacial and temporal context of the events to be remembered, while at the same time allowing the accuracy of the memories to be measured.The test is based on previous work with animals, and has been adapted for people. Unlike many new memory tests, we do not use computers, as interaction with computers can be daunting for some older people, or people with cognitive deficits. We call our new test the Real-World What-Where-When Memory Test.We use a relatively cluttered office room with plenty of possible hiding locations. We place a pile of 20 small, easy to label objects on a desk in the room. Next to the objects, we place a sheet of paper with eight photographs on it.These are photographs of eight of the objects, which the participants have to take from the pile in the order indicated on the sheet. We do this to make sure the participants will pay attention to the objects they are asked to remember. Thank you for taking part in our study.When the participant arrives, she is first briefed about the purpose of the experiment and about what to expect. This is done both verbally and using an information sheet that the participant can read. She is also provided with a written consent form.The participant is then taken to the door of the experiment room. So the purpose of this task is for you to hide some objects in a room and you will be asked to remember them later. You'll be presented with a pile of objects on the desk.Next to the pile you'll find a sheet with pictures of eight objects that you must hide during the task. At the bottom left of each picture, there is a number indicating the order in which you must hide the objects. You may only pick up and hide one object at a time.I will point to the location where you should hide each object. Once you enter the room, you should start counting seconds out loud and continue doing that until you leave the room. Later in this study, we will repeat this with different objects in different locations.After this, you will be asked to remember what objects you hid, where you hid them, and on which occasion. If you have any questions, please ask them now, as you won't be able to once we enter the room. Why do I have to count?This is called articulatory suppression and we do this for all participants. The reason we do this is to stop you from using language during the task. In order for us to assess your memory for an actual event rather than your memory for a list of words, for objects and locations.If you're happy, we can start the task now. So thank you for taking part in this part of our study. The participant is thanked and asked to return two hours later.Alternatively, during this interval, the participant could be tested on other tests of interest to the study. This is the same task as you did before. You will be presented with a pile of objects on the desk.Please take as much time as you need. Are you ready for the second part of the test? Yes.Thank you for completing part two of our study.The participant is again thanked and asked to return two hours later. As before, during this interval, the participant could also be tested on other tests of interest to the study. After the participant returns, she is asked to recall the two previous events.I would like you to try and recall the objects that you hid and the locations you hid them and on which of the occasions, so phase one or phase two. Where possible, try to match the objects with the locations and the phase. If you can only remember one or the other, this is okay, write down whatever you can remember.Write down everything you can remember on the paper in the order you remember it. You may draw a diagram or a map if you wish. So if you'd like to just start writing there, that would be great.Thank you. So this is a vividness scale. Please circle the level of vividness with which you feel you are able to visualize the object's location and phases when you were remembering them.This only applies to the objects that you could actually remember. From the data collected, we could count the number of correctly recalled combinations of which object was hidden in which location, and on which of the two hiding occasions. This is the main output of the test.It has been shown to be sensitive to aging, and to depression. This number out of 16, can also be correlated with performance in other cognitive tests. However, our test allows for a wider range of measures to be extracted as well.This way, we can identify whether deficits in episodic memory performance are purely due to object memory, spacial memory, or to the binding of object, spacial, and temporal information. We believe our new task has a number of advantages over existing episodic memory tests. It combines the ecological validity of recalling events from one's own life, with the experimental control of word lists.It also allows us to test components of episodic memory, such as spacial and object memory within the same task. It is very simple and cheap to run, and does not require any specialized equipment. The task is also easily modified to become a test of incidental encoding, rather than intentional encoding.All you have to do is change the instructions, such as the participants believe the counting of the seconds is the real task, and the hiding of the objects is a way to distract them from this task. You would then reveal the real nature of the task right before the final retrieval phase. We hope you agree with us, that this task has great potential, both for experimental studies of episodic memory and for clinical assessment of episodic memory problems.

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JoVE Journal

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Learn a novel episodic memory test assessing what-where-when recall across two occasions. This user-friendly method measures cognitive aging and helps researchers study memory-related disorders.

A Real-world What-Where-When Memory Test

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