The MRC National Survey of Health of Development (NSHD) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 68-70 sweep using the Verbal Learning/Word List Recall Test.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Verbal (memory) |
| Measures: | Attention |
| Short-term episodic memory | |
| Verbal memory | |
| Free-recall memory | |
| CHC: | Glr (Long-Term Storage and Retrieval) |
| Administration method: | Research nurse; face to face; pen and paper |
| Procedure: | As in sweeps age 53 and age 60 - 64 years |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://skylark.ucl.ac.uk/NSHD/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=questionnaires:2015_capi.pdf (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | One point was awarded for each correctly remembered word (0 - 45) |
| Item-level variable(s): | WLE115x - WLT315x |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | WLT15x |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 2,074 | |
| Range = 0 - 40 | |
| Mean = 22.17 | |
| SD = 6.07 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
|
| Age of participants (months): | Mean = 834.14, SD = 2.93, Range = 828 - 848 |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | NCDS – Age 50 – Verbal Learning/Word List Recall Test (Immediate and Delayed (1 trial only; 10 words, presented aurally) |
| NCDS – Age 61-63 – Proposed repeat of tests at age 50 | |
| BCS70 – Age 46-47 – Verbal Learning/Word List Recall Test (Immediate and Delayed)) (1 trial only; 10 words, presented aurally) | |
| NSHD – Age 43 – Verbal Learning/Word List Recall Test | |
| NSHD – Age 53 – Verbal Learning/Word List Recall Test | |
| NSHD – Age 60-64 – Verbal Learning/Word List Recall Test | |
| Source: | This task was developed specifically for this study by the NSHD team. Similar tasks have been used to measure verbal learning for decades, e.g. Bush and Mosteller (1955). |
| Technical resources: | None |
| Reference examples: | Proitsi, P., Kuh, D., Wong, A., Maddock, J., Bendayan, R., Wulaningsih, W., ... & Richards, M. (2018). Lifetime cognition and late midlife blood metabolites: findings from a British birth cohort. Translational Psychiatry, 8(1), 203. |
| Tsui, A., Kuh, D., Richards, M., & Davis, D. (2018). Delirium symptoms are associated with decline in cognitive function between ages 53 and 69 years: findings from a British birth cohort study. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 14(5), 617-622. |
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in NSHD
- Overview of adulthood cognitive measures across all studies
This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.