Normative verbal and non-verbal memory test scores for Australian women aged 56-67.

Objective: To establish normative data for tests of verbal and non-verbal memory for midlife Australian-born women, and in so doing investigate factors which contribute to variation in test performance.

Method: Two hundred and fifty-seven healthy women aged 56-67 years (mean age 60), who are participating in the Melbourne Women's Midlife Longitudinal Health Project, were administered two word list learning tasks, a story recall task (the East Boston Memory Test) and the Faces subtest from the Wechsler Memory Scale III as part of a larger neuropsychological battery. Word list learning tasks consisted of either 16 semantically related words, derived from the California Verbal Learning Test II, or a list of 10 unrelated words. Mood was assessed by the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression questionnaire.

Results: Education was significantly related to memory performance and there was a non-significant trend for test scores to decline with age. Mood was unrelated to test performance. A confirmatory factor analysis indicated a clear distinction between verbal and non-verbal memory performances. Mean scores were stratified by education (less than 12 years vs. 12 or more years) and age (56-59 vs. 60-67 years), and scaled normative data were constructed for all the tests.

Conclusion: This study provides education-based normative data for tests of verbal and non-verbal memory for midlife Australian women. The establishment of population-based normative data will facilitate future investigations of ageing and dementia in Australian women.