Although the accuracy of the diagnosis of cognitive impairment in the elderly depends on the appropriateness of the norms for the neuropsychological tests used, the importance of examining health status, native intelligence, and gender when attempting to describe cognitive changes of aging has received little attention. The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) is one widely used instrument for assessing memory dysfunction. The effects of age, education, verbal intelligence, and gender on the RAVLT were investigated in 114 healthy volunteers between the ages of 40 and 84 years. Subjects completed the RAVLT as part of a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation. The vocabulary subtest from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale was also administered. The results revealed that, in the best fitting regression model, verbal intelligence and gender accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in performance on every learning trial of the RAVLT. Age was only related to performance on the first two trials and education was not related to performance. Higher verbal intelligence was associated with better performance, and women consistently performed better than men. These results suggest that many tests reported to demonstrate an aging effect may actually only be reflecting heterogeneity in verbal intelligence and gender differences in the population studied. (Author/NB)