One of the major advantages of the Rey Auditory‐Verbal Learning Test (AVLT) is its multiple measures of learning and memory. This study evaluated empirically whether the different scores are, in fact, not merely different expressions of a single factor, but, rather, measures of different memory domains. The Rey AVLT was administered to 146 normal subjects. Factor analyses produced one, two, or three factors depending on the combination of scores included in the analysis and on the criteria used to determine the number of factors. The basic factors identified were acquisition and retention. The latter can be subdivided further into storage and retrieval, thus yielding a total of three factors.
Norms on seven composite scores derived from the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT) are reported here. These scores reflect a variety of verbal memory processes: learning, interference, retention over time, and retrieval efficiency. The norms are based on 943 children ranging in age from 8 to 17 years, divided into 10 age cohorts, and 528 adults, ranging in age from 21 to 91 years, divided into 6 age cohorts. Overall, the learning measures were the most sensitive to age. The most significant changes in memory as measured with these composite scores took place in the very young and very old age groups. These changes may be attributable to frontal lobe maturation in youth and deterioration in old age. Female participants show superiority over male participants on various verbal memory measures. These norms on the composite scores are primarily expected to serve the clinician in the process of memory assessment by supplementing the existing norms on individual trials of the Rey AVLT.
Closed-head-injured (CHI) and control groups were tested on a temporal order task under intentional and incidental retrieval conditions. Subjects were given five presentations of a list of nouns. In the incidental retrieval condition, subjects were told that they were to remember the words but that the order was not important. In the intentional retrieval condition, subjects were given the words in an order different from that in which they were originally presented and were asked to reorder the words to match the original order. For both conditions we compared the order in which words were recalled to the order in which they were originally presented. The results suggest that temporal order memory had more effortful characteristics in the intentional than in the incidental retrieval condition. The two groups did not differ significantly in the incidental retrieval condition. However, while the control group showed a significant improvement in the intentional retrieval condition. CHI groups performance did not significantly change. This study highlights two major points: (1) intentionality at the retrieval stage determines the effortfulness with which information is processed; (2) the more automatic the tasks, the better it is preserved following closed-head injury.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.