Extension to one week of verbal memory consolidation assessment

Although impairments of long-term recall affect everyday life, they may be missed by standard delayed recall tests, which typically assess the ability to retain new information within a few minutes, without encompassing the consolidation process. We adapted a verbal memory test to evaluate long-term memory consolidation in healthy volunteers.

A sample of 238 participants (M = 42.23 years old, SD = 16.45) was administered an adapted version of the French RL/RI-16 (Van der Linden & the members of GREMEM, 2004), the One-Week Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test-word version, in which special feature relies on a 30-min and a 1-week-delayed recall after encoding. We proposed normative data on 4 indicators, depending on participants' own performance during the test, to measure their encoding, storage and consolidation abilities, with a method using an ascendant step-by-step linear regression model and a percentile procedure.

Results showed a better performance in women than in men for encoding and cueing scores (p < .01 and p < .05, respectively). We also highlighted an increase of the forgetting score according to the recall delay after encoding (30 min vs. 7 days; Z = 12.49, p < .001), the forgetting percentage 7 days after encoding being largely influenced by participants' age and gender (F[2, 236] = 248.1, p < .001; adjusted R2 = 67%).

This study emphasized the role of demographic factors on long-term memory consolidation. The demographically adjusted normative data we provide for the One-Week Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test-word version make it a sensitive tool for long-term memory consolidation assessment in clinical and forensic practice. (PsycINFO Database Record