Visualisation and memory questionnaire FAQs

Your questionnaire and the web link to it that we have sent to you by email are specific to you; this is so that we can add the data from the questionnaire to other data that you have provided previously. This means that it is very important that your questionnaire is only completed by you. Sometimes participants share email addresses or devices with other members of their household, and this has
led to questionnaires being completed by someone other than the intended recipient. We use your date of birth to double-check that the questionnaire has been completed by the correct person before releasing the data to researchers. We need to ask for your full date of birth because a partial date of birth may not distinguish you from someone you share an email address or device with (if you both have the same month and year of birth).

We ask you to complete an identity check each time you start the questionnaire in case an error was made the first time or in case someone else (e.g. someone you share an email address with) started or attempts to complete your questionnaire.

If you realise that you have completed a questionnaire intended for another UK Biobank participant (for example, someone who shares an email address with you), please let our Participant Resource Centre know by calling 0800 0 276 276 (Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm).

We are afraid that we will not be able to reset the questionnaire to enable you to complete it again, but it is very important that we know that this has happened so that we do not assign your data to the wrong person in our database.

Because of the global interest in the work of UK Biobank, questionnaires developed for UK Biobank are shared with researchers around the world for use in their own research. So that researchers can choose which sets of questions they ask in their research studies (rather than having to use a full UK Biobank questionnaire), the questionnaires are split up into sections (modules).

This is the way that our online questionnaires are designed. You have to click the ‘Save/continue’ button at the bottom of each page to ensure that your answers on that page are saved. If you go back to the previous page without having clicked this button, your answers on the current page will not be saved and you will need to enter the information again.

We provide a comments box at the end of the questionnaire for you to provide us with extra
information if you would like to do so. If an issue comes up that you would like to comment on as you are working through the questionnaire, please make a note of it and include it in the comments box at the end. Please note, however, that any comments you leave will not be systematically reviewed. If you would like to tell us something that requires our immediate attention or action, please call our Participant Resource Centre on 0800 0 276 276 (Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm).

Please click on the ‘Show question numbers’ button (situated towards the bottom of the page, after the block of questions) to display the question numbers.

Please open the section and then simply click ‘Save/continue’.

Please check that you are using the correct personal details and Participant ID (this can be found on most pieces of correspondence that we send to you). Please make sure that you are using the first letter of your surname rather than that of your first name. If you are still unsuccessful, please contact our Participant Resource Centre at ukbiobank@ukbiobank.ac.uk or on 0800 0 276 276.

In order for the questionnaire to be marked as ‘finished’ by our systems, every section of the
questionnaire - including the final section, which is called the ‘End page’ - must be marked as complete. It is possible that this has not been done, so we advise that you return to the questionnaire and check this. Even if you don’t add any comments on the ‘End page’, you will need to click ‘Save/continue’. Alternatively, you might have accidentally completed the questionnaire belonging to another UK Biobank participant with whom you share an email address (for example, your spouse or partner). Please double-check that you have used the correct web link that is unique to you, which was included in the email which we addressed specifically to you.

We are not able to provide participants with a copy of the questionnaire. However, this will be
available on the Showcase section of our website once the questionnaire data have been released to researchers (https://biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk/showcase/).

Yes please. There are sections of the questionnaire that may still be applicable to you, for example on your autobiographical memory (ability to remember facts, events and places) and your ability to imagine the whole range of different senses (e.g. touch, sound, smell). Any sections that might be difficult to complete if you have a visual impairment will give you the option to select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ so that you can move on to the next section.

Please answer the questions in this section based on how well you could recognise people before your eyesight started to deteriorate, if you can remember this. If this is too difficult to recall, please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ for each question.

Please answer the questions in this section based on how well you could recognise people before your eyesight started to deteriorate, if you can remember this. If this is too difficult to recall, please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ for each question.

Because a change of appearance does make it harder to recognise others, we are particularly
interested in how well you recognise a friend or acquaintance when they have not made substantial changes to their appearance.

It can sometimes feel difficult to know whether a skill is ‘average’ or falls within the average range. Please do your best to place yourself compared to people your age in the general population. Average means you are generally like most people your age. For the purposes of this question, if you have felt that your face recognition skills are similar to most other people (e.g. in your local community or in your workplace), you are likely to be average. If you have noticed that you struggle a little or have a slightly harder time than the people around you in different settings (e.g. friends, colleagues, people in your community), you might be somewhat below average. If you have great difficulty, you may be somewhat below average or far below average. Alternatively, if you have an easier time with this skill compared to the people you know, you may be somewhat above or far above average. If you feel unable to make this judgement, please select ‘Do not know’.

For this question, we are specifically enquiring about your face recognition ability so please consider this situation under ideal circumstances (e.g. no social anxiety, corrected eyesight).

By ‘out of context’, we mean when you encounter or observe family members and close friends or casual acquaintances in a situation where you would not typically expect to come across them.

If you do not know anyone who wears a uniform, please select the ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ option.

We consider your adult life to begin at 18, so please estimate how much your abilities have changed since then.

Please make your best guess if you feel confident enough to do so, or select ‘Prefer not to answer’.

If this is the case, please select ‘I am unable to see the image’ for the practice question and you will then be forwarded to the end of this section so that you can move on to the next part of the questionnaire.

If this is the case, please select ‘I am unable to see the image’ for the practice question and you will then be forwarded to the end of this section so that you can move on to the next part of the questionnaire.

Yes. If you recognise one of the faces but cannot remember their name, please just provide any other information that could identify them (e.g. the name of the character they played in a film, TV show or play; the name of a film, TV show or play in which they appeared; or the specific political position they held).

You are able to go back and change your answer, but your second answer will not be saved. This is because we are interested only in your initial response to the photographs.

For these questions, we are interested in how your memory is in general for specific events that occurred at least one month in the past, but you may respond according to how you remember events from any point in your life.

Questionnaires often contain altered versions of the same question to ensure that people are
responding consistently, as slight variations in wording can be interpreted differently by you. This helps us to ensure that you are answering based on the meaning of the question, rather than the specific words used in the question. So yes, please answer both questions.

Please either make your best guess based on your experiences with navigation, or select ‘Prefer not to answer’.

Yes please. Questionnaires often contain altered versions of the same question to ensure that people are responding consistently, as slight variations in wording can be interpreted differently by you. This helps us to ensure that you are answering based on the meaning of the question, rather than the specific words used in the question.

We consider your adult life to begin at 18, so please estimate how much your abilities have changed since then.

Please make your best guess if you feel confident enough to do so, or select ‘Prefer not to answer’.

If this is the case, please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ for both questions.

Please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’.

Please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’. 

Please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’.

Please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’.

We are asking you to imagine how your body feels in these two scenarios.

We consider your adult life to begin at 18, so please estimate how much your abilities have changed since then.

Please make your best guess if you feel confident enough to do so, or select ‘Prefer not to answer’.

If you have a severe visual impairment which prevents you from answering these questions, please select ‘Prefer not to answer/Not applicable’ for each question. 

We mean the shape or outline of their face, head, shoulders and body.

We mean the way they characteristically hold their head or stand when, for example, thinking or making conversation.

We consider your adult life to begin at 18, so please estimate how much your abilities have changed since then.

Please make your best guess if you feel confident enough to do so, or select ‘Prefer not to answer’.

Synaesthesia is often described as a ‘crossing of the senses.’ In synaesthesia, one quality of
experience is accompanied by an involuntary unrelated secondary experience (e.g. hearing sounds gives rise to seeing colours).
If you have synaesthesia, you might notice that your senses tend to intertwine, giving your
perceptions of the world an additional dimension. Perhaps every time you bite into a food, you also feel its geometric shape: round, sharp, or square. Maybe when you are feeling emotional over a person you love, you can close your eyes and see certain colours playing at your field of vision. You may be reading these words with a series of accompanying voices in your head. All of these experiences are examples of synaesthesia.

Yes, we are interested to know whether you have experienced synaesthesia your whole life or for only part of your life.

We are interested to know whether when you experience synaesthesia, you always encounter the same type of synaesthesia or whether this changes. For example, do you always see a particular letter in a specific colour or does this colour ever change?

‘Sequence-space synaesthesia’, also called ‘spatial-sequence synaesthesia’, causes people who experience it to perceive numbered sequences as visual patterns. For example, they may see the days on a calendar projected in front of them, looking so real that they could touch them.

It is not possible to return to this comments section once you have clicked on the ‘Save/continue’ button and finished the questionnaire. So please take your time once you reach this final section of the questionnaire to reflect back on the information you have kindly provided us with to ensure that you have told us everything that you would like to.

Any comments you leave will not be systematically reviewed. If you would like to tell us something that requires our immediate attention or action, please call our Participant Resource Centre on 0800 0 276 276 (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm).

Any information you provide in this section will be saved and could be evaluated by researchers in the future (for example, using techniques such as ’natural language processing’). However, UK Biobank does not currently have the resources to undertake this analysis.