Marcella Laiacona

• MD
• Istituti Clinici Scientifici Maugeri IRCCS

A new test of prose memory standadized on the Italian population

Objective: Two aspects of aphasic picture naming were examined: response consistency, that is, the extent to which the accuracy of the response to the same stimulus is replicated in a successive examination, and response predictability, that is, the extent to which accuracy depends on the characteristics of each stimulus. Methods: Thirty-eight a...

Objectives: After adjustment of scores for demographic variables, especially when test scales have an upper limit that causes a ceiling effect, the original score variability is deeply altered and the scale properties degenerate. We present a method for fixing normality thresholds on scores previously adjusted for demographic variables that overco...

Nouns and verbs can dissociate following brain damage, at both lexical retrieval and morphosyntactic processing levels. In order to document the range and the neural underpinnings of behavioral dissociations, twelve aphasics with disproportionate difficulty naming objects or actions were asked to apply phonologically identical morphosyntactic trans...

This study presents revised and extended norms for a picture naming test [Laiacona et al. (Arch Neurol Psicol Psichiatr 54:209–248, 1993)], based on 80 Snodgrass and Vanderwart (J Exp Psychol Human Learn Mem 6:174–215, 1980) pictures, devised to detect a categorical dissociation in the naming of items between biological and man-made categories. Thi...

Objective: Previous studies of verbal fluency have reported higher rates of perseverative responses in both Alzheimer's disease (AD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) relative to control groups. These perseverations could arise from a number of impairments-for example, failures in working memory, inhibitory control, or word retrieval-and different...

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a brief cognitive screening instrument developed by Nasreddine et al. to detect mild cognitive impairment, a high-risk condition for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. In this study we report normative data on the MoCA-Italian version, collected on a sample of 225 Italian healthy subjects ra...

The herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE) patient reported in this study presented a left hemisphere lesion limited to the left insula and to the left anterior parahippocampal region. The patient was followed longitudinally, focusing on the aphasia type, the language recovery, and the integrity of semantic representations. The language deficit was of f...

In Alzheimer's dementia (AD), letter fluency is less impaired than category fluency. To check whether category fluency and letter fluency depend differently on semantics and attention, 53 mild AD patients were given animal and letter fluency tasks, two semantic tests (the Verbal Semantic Questionnaire and the BORB Association Match test), and two a...

The Milner Landmark Task allows the disentanglement of perceptual and response-related components of unilat-eral neglect. If these two components reflect separate functional systems, then cases should be observed in which the two components evolve differently across time. To test this hypothesis we surveyed a continuous series of 21 right hemispher...

Besides ocular diseases, also cerebral damage may cause colour vision deficits; cerebral lesions may be associated with a variety of clinical conditions that impair colour processing. This study presents procedures and normative data for a rapid, comprehensive seven-test battery aimed at assessing colour perception, colour naming and object colour...

Lexical frequency and item familiarity definitely influence name retrieval in clinical studies, but the relevance of concept typicality has been less extensively investigated. A relevant theoretical question is whether familiarity and typicality exert an independent influence on the name retrieval of aphasic patients. In this study we assembled a l...

Semantic dissociations show that biological stimuli present a further dissociation between animals and plant life. Almost all cases of greater impairment of plant life knowledge were males, suggesting a higher male familiarity with animals possibly derived from different daily activities. To verify this hypothesis, we collected familiarity ratings...

Case A.C.A. presented an associated impairment of visual recognition and semantic knowledge for celebrities and biological objects. This case was relevant for (a) the neuroanatomical correlations, and (b) the relationship between visual recognition and semantics within the biological domain and the conspecifics domain. A.C.A. was not affected by an...

In this study we analysed the relationship between damage in the territory of the posterior cerebral artery and semantic knowledge, with special reference to category dissociations. Twenty-eight posterior cerebral artery stroke patients (18 left, 8 right and 2 bilateral posterior cerebral artery infarctions) completed a neuropsychological battery a...

In this study we investigated 12 cases of "mixed dysgraphia", a spelling impairment where regular words are spelt better than either ambiguous words or regular non-words. Two explanations of mixed dysgraphia were formerly offered by Luzzatti et al. (1998): (i) a double functional lesion of the orthographic output lexicon (or damage to its access) a...

The literature reports a sex-related asymmetry in the ability to process different semantic categories: women are more proficient with biological categories and men with man-made objects. The origin of this asymmetry is still debated. In this study, we directly checked whether the acquisition of names belonging to different semantic categories diff...

In this study we contrasted the Category fluency and Letter fluency performance of 198 normal subjects, 57 Alzheimer's patients and 57 patients affected by traumatic brain injury (TBI). The aim was to check whether, besides the prevalence of Category fluency deficit often reported among Alzheimer's patients, the TBI group presented the opposite dis...

Two Alzheimer's patients participated in a longitudinal study of picture naming aimed at analysing the effect of lexical frequency, age of acquisition, stimulus familiarity, word length, name imageability, visual complexity and semantic category membership on naming success. The results were analysed with a new method [Capitani, E., & Laiacona, M....

A left hemisphere stroke patient presented a disproportionate difficulty for body parts knowledge without autotopagnosia. The deficit concerned the lexical-semantic representation of body parts and was most severe for limbs. The ability to gesture was spared and action naming was not more impaired than object naming. On the basis of normal naming l...

A sexual asymmetry has been recently found on semantic memory tasks: after brain damage, a disproportionate deficit for information about biological categories has been reported more frequently for male patients. A review of cases shows that the fine-grained pattern is more complicated in that there is a strong interaction with sex: Disproportionat...

Semantic verbal fluency is widely used in clinical and experimental studies. This task is highly sensitive to the presence of brain pathology and is frequently impaired after frontal lesions. Besides the total number of words generated, a qualitative analysis of their sequence can add valuable information about the impaired cognitive components. Th...

We provide objective data concerning the age of acquisition (AoA) of words from 202 Italian children 34-69 months of age. We investigated picture naming with 80 concrete words belonging to eight semantic categories that are included in a widely used battery for the study of naming and semantic memory. For each word, we calculated three different in...

A. R. Luria introduced the interpretation of a meaningful picture as a tool for assessing pre-frontal impairment. We gave this test to 196 normal adults, who were asked to communicate what was happening in the portrayed scene (a boy chases a mouse hidden under a cupboard, while three frightened girls assist). The same subjects were given two other...

In this study we report the long-term follow-up of EA, a patient originally affected by a disproportionate semantic impairment of biological categories due to herpetic encephalitis. After 10 years, EA still presented a biological categories semantic impairment, but his deficit had become minimal for animals while it remained considerably severe for...

We report the performance of two patients who presented with complementary deficits in naming nouns relative to verbs: EA performed far worse with nouns than verbs, while MR performed worse with verbs than nouns. The two patients' grammatical category-specific deficits could not easily be explained in terms of damage to specific types of semantic k...

In this study, we present a method for analysing the evolution of picture naming errors in the follow-up of single patients affected by acute aphasia. In particular, we have based our analysis on the presence of response type inconsistency, as patients often fail to give the same type of response to the same stimulus at a task repetition attempted...

The relevance of gesture knowledge for the semantic representation of manipulable objects was investigated in a series of 15 patients with a focal left-hemisphere lesion. The patients were classified according to the presence/absence of ideomotor and ideational apraxia. We investigated picture naming and word-picture matching (pointing to a picture...

We report the performance of a herpes simplex encephalitis patient, EA, who shows a dissociation between poor performance for living things and spared performance for sensory quality categories, when appropriate measures are taken to control for baseline differences among categories in task difficulty and when we eliminate the contribution of visua...

In this study we provide a critical review of the clinical evidence available to date in the field of semantic category-specific deficits. The motivation for undertaking this review is that not all the data reported in the literature are useful for adjudicating among extant theories. This project is an attempt to answer two basic questions: (1) wha...

This paper reports the results obtained from a writing task given to 23 Italian patients suffering from mild to moderate dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). Spelling performance was tested with a task that taps the sub-word-level (spelling of regular words and nonwords), and the lexical route (spelling of regular and irregular words), in line w...

We present a new corpus of 80 pictures of unreal objects, useful for a controlled assessment of object reality decision. The new pictures were assembled from parts of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart [J. Exp. Psychol., Hum. Learning Memory 6; 1980: 174] set and were devised for the purpose of contrasting natural categories (animals, fruits and vegetabl...

Picture naming requires early visual analysis, accessing stored structural knowledge, semantic activation, and lexical retrieval. We tested the effect of perceptual, lexical, and semantic variables on the performance of aphasics in picture naming and assessed prevalence of natural categories vs artifact dissociations. Forty-nine aphasics were asked...

The relation of symptoms to cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia is still controversial. This study was aimed (i) at verifying if a homogeneous sample of 10 young treated outpatients in remission from psychotic symptoms displays a characteristic pattern of cognitive dysfunction and (ii) at testing the issue of a general cognitive impairment. The...

In the literature about category effects in semantic memory, body parts and musical instruments are often considered atypical, because in cases with a disproportionate impairment of living categories body parts are relatively spared, while musical instruments are often severely defective. In this study the performance of 57 subjects affected by dis...

We describe a new case of semantic deficit in which nonliving categories are disproportionately impaired. PL, a woman affected by progressive degeneration of the left temporal lobe, was examined twice, at a distance of 1 year. The deficit was first apparent on naming and on a verbal semantic questionnaire, but a year later nonliving categories were...

We carried out four experiments to assess the extent to which familiarity with certain objects in everyday life is related to gender and can account, at least partially, for the semantic category dissociation observed in a few brain-damaged patients. In the first experiment, 210 normal subjects, half males and half females, were given the names of...

We carried out four experiments to assess the extent to which familiarity with certain objects in everyday life is related to gender and can account, at least partially, for the semantic category dissociation observed in a few brain-damaged patients.In the first experiment, 210 normal subjects, half males and half females, were given the names of 6...

The Wisconsin card sorting test and the Weigl test are two neuropsychological tools widely used in clinical practice to assess frontal lobe functions. In this study we present norms useful for Italian subjects aged from 15 to 85 years, with 5-17 years of education. Concerning the Wisconsin card sorting test, a new measure of global efficiency (glob...

A group of 51 patients affected by possible semantic memory deficit were given a picture naming task for the purposes of a comparison between six categories, three of Nonliving nature (tools, furniture, vehicles) and three of a Living nature (animals, fruits, and vegetables). A logistic regression analysis was used for a multiple single case study,...

An early, formalized cognitive evaluation of'minimally responsive' patients could be important in the planning of their care and rehabilitation as well as in providing a realistic prognosis and studying the modality of the cognitive recovery. A short, bedside, neuropsychologically-oriented test-battery, the Preliminary Neuropsychological Battery, a...

Assuming that interference occurs in normals charged with learning a list of famous people's names paired with incongruous activities, Kapur (Kapur et al., 1986) demonstrated a facilitation effect in a selective retrograde amnesic, which he interpreted as interference elimination. We tested this assumption in 23 normals administering a list of famo...

In attentional tasks a basic performance is often contrasted with the same task administered with some additional load, defined here as "interference". However, it is questionable how interference should be quantified. The raw difference between the interference-loaded ("complex") task and the basic task is marred by measurement artefacts. There ar...

Recent studies suggest that gender influences phonetically-cued fluency and some semantic memory tasks. In this study we analysed the effect of demographic variables on semantic fluency tasks. The semantic categories considered were: animals, fruits, tools and vehicles. The influence of age and education was common to all the categories considered...

Five-hundred and three normal subjects were given a phonetically cued word-fluency task in order to investigate the controversial issue of the influence of gender and aging on this task. Subjects were requested to say in one minute all the words that occurred to them, beginning with a given letter (F, P and L). Besides the expected significance of...

We report results of a writing task given to 53 mildly to moderately aphasic Italian subjects. The task was designed to test the writing performance along the subword-level routine for the spelling of regular words and non-words, and along the lexical routine for the spelling of irregular words. The aim of the study was to identify the incidence of...

Two-hundred and nine normal subjects underwent a study aimed at providing norms for some attention tests currently used in neuropsychological examination. Norms were calculated taking into account the demographic variables. Our battery included single visuo-manual and go/no-go reaction times, and two versions of the Stroop Colour-Word Test. For the...

To analyse prognostic factors in patients operated upon for cerebral aneurysms. A previous investigation by our group showed that patients operated later than 10 days after bleeding have a worse neuropsychological prognosis, but the number of patients operated upon within 3 days was not sufficient. Here, a new sample of patients with early surgery...

Seven patients affected by Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (DAT) took part in a longitudinal study aimed at assessing the qualitative and quantitative evolution of picture naming impairment. The follow-up lasted 6-36 months and the patients were examined at intervals of 6 months or longer. We found that the absolute number of lexical-semantic errors...

Several studies on picture naming in Alzheimer's disease have reported inconsistent findings regarding semantic category dissociation. To clarify this point, 26 patients suffering from dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) were given a naming task, based on 60 black and white drawings, which allowed us to take into account several variables that m...

Seven patients affected by Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (DAT) took part in a longitudinal study aimed at assessing the qualitative and quantitative evolution of picture naming impairment. The follow-up lasted 6–36 months and the patients were examined at intervals of 6 months or longer. We found that the absolute number of lexical-semantic errors...

Equivalent Scores (ES; Capitani & Laiacona, 1988) is a 5-point scale that offers a solution to the problem of standardizing neuropsychological scores after adjustment for age and education, given that the common z-standardization is not generally applicable in these cases. ES are discussed, and their properties and limits are compared with those of...

We report the neuropsychological findings of two patients (LF and EA) with herpes simplex encephalitis. Both patients presented a greater deficit for living than non-living categories in a number of tasks, although EA was much more impaired than LF. We controlled the several stimulus variables that might affect the performance and could demonstrate...

A patient affected by amnestic aphasia, E.B., presented with a prevailing impairment in the use of operational signs and punctuation marks. His performance on tasks exploring his knowledge of these symbols is compared with that of two other patients suffering from similar aphasic disturbances. This comparison enables us to reject the hypothesis tha...

We describe the effect of language rehabilitation on the naming deficits of 2 patients affected by longstanding amnestic aphasia. In particular, our aim was to study the evolution of the rate of inconsistent naming (i.e., performance with stimuli that were named sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly when the test was repeated at close inter...

In this paper we have reviewed the cases of vascular crossed aphasia reported in the literature, in order to check whether deep lesions are really overrepresented in crossed aphasia with respect to standard aphasia. The comparison with a large sample of standard left-hemisphere-damaged aphasics revealed a significantly higher incidence of purely de...

In this paper, we describe the case of a right-handed man, MR, who after right thalamic haemorrhage presented subtranscortical aphasia. Of the disturbances generally associated with standard left hemisphere functions, the patient presented acalculia but not apraxia. Among the functions attributed to the standard right hemisphere, MR showed impairme...

The Trail Making Test (TMT), which explores visual-conceptual and visual-motor tracking, is a frequently used neuropsychological test because of its ease of administration and sensitivity to brain damage. In this paper, norms are provided for the time scores derived from parts A and B, and for the (B-A) difference. The data were collected from 287...

Interest in frontal functions has progressively increased over recent years; however, despite this, there are only a few "frontal" tasks for which Italian normative data are available. The objective of this study was to obtain reference values for two frontal tests from a random sample of normal adults: the first (the Test of Classification and Rec...

A case of pure retrograde amnesia following mild head injury is reported. Neuropsychological, psychodynamic and statistical approaches are employed in an attempt to disentangle the clinical picture presented by the patient. Focal retrograde amnesia, psychogenic retrograde amnesia and simulated amnesia are all taken into account. From a public event...

Two experiments examined the generalizability of the effects of word length and phonological similarity with visual and auditory presentation in immediate verbal serial ordered recall. In Experiment 1, data were collected from 251 adult volunteers drawn from a broad cross-section of the normal population. Word length and phonological similarity in...

The preferential involvement of living categories in naming impairment is well recognised in Herpes Simplex Encephalitis (HSE). In this paper we describe naming, neuropsychological and neuroradiological findings with seven fresh HSE cases. Patients were given a picture naming task that included 60 items belonging to 6 different categories (three li...

To determine whether the age‐related decline of cognitive abilities is related to educational level, 307 normal participants aged 40 to 85 entered a cross‐sectional neuropsychological study. The test battery consisted of five tests chosen for their ability to show a linear decline with age. Of the three patterns of interaction between education and...

In this paper, we describe the case of a right-handed man, MR, who after right thalamic haemorrhage presented subtranscortical aphasia. Of the disturbances generally associated with standard left hemisphere functions, the patient presented acalculia but not apraxia. Among the functions attributed to the standard right hemisphere, MR showed impairme...

In this paper we have reviewed the cases of vascular crossed aphasia reported in the literature, in order to check whether deep lesions are really overrepresented in crossed aphasia with respect to standard aphasia. The comparison with a large sample of standard left-hemisphere-damaged aphasics revealed a significantly higher incidence of purely de...

This study aims to identify the cognitive variables involved in a task of visual recognition of meaningful and meaningless two-dimensional line-drawings of shapes; the Poppelreuter-Ghent Overlapping Figures Test. It was found that the performance of healthy controls was influenced by age and education, but not sex. Age and education adjusted norms...

A picture naming task and a semantic memory verbal questionnaire were given to normal subjects to assess the possible asymmetry between knowledge for non-living and living things. We first examined 60 elderly subjects with low education. Asymmetry between non-living and living things was found in the semantic knowledge questionnaire and living thin...

We report two head-injured patients whose knowledge of living things was selectively disrupted. Their semantic knowledge was tested with naming and verbal comprehension tasks and a verbal questionnaire. In all of them there was consistent evidence that knowledge of living things was impaired and that of non-living things was relatively preserved. T...

A neuropsychological experiment on autobiographical retrieval of incidental past events, checked by means of a standardized enquiry, was carried out on a series of 16 patients with CT-assessed frontal lobe lesions. Of 16 patients, six were impaired on autobiographical retrieval. Moreover, eight were impaired on supraspan verbal learning. Impairment...

We describe the case of a woman presenting with a clinical syndrome closely resembling progressive supranuclear palsy, who also showed some progressive neuropsychological defects (aphasia and apraxia) not consistent with a simple loss of timing and activation as is generally postulated in this pathology. The case is discussed with regard to the def...

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Synopsis The aim of the study is to provide (i) a standardized procedure for a Cancellation Test of Digits, designed to assess in the visual modality selective attention deficits in patients with Alzheimer's disease, and (ii) a detailed analysis of how patients cope with it. Age-, education-, and sex-adjusted normative scores earned by 352 healthy...

For more than a century, the cerebral cortex has been regarded as the site of cognitive activities such as language, thought, and spatial awareness. In the past 20 years, however, an increasing amount of evidence has accumulated to suggest that subcortical structures such as the thalamus and tha basal ganglia may participate in specific aspects of...

The hypothesis is discussed that retrieving autobiographical information through the remote memory archives is mainly an organizational, searching task. The organizational activity involved in AB-retrieving is believed to take the form of Williams’ (1978) “recollection” process. It is agreed that planning is one functional aspect of attention, and...

This paper analyzes the spatial memory performance of 495 subjects. Both short-term and long-term memory have been analyzed by means of the Corsi blocktapping test. We provide separate norms for the learning of a supra-span sequence according to the level of spatial short-term memory. The long-term memory of males and females was compared in groups...