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 adult Italian subjects stratified by gender, schooling and age (from 20 to 79 years). The test scores were affected by age, education and general intelligence (as expressed by Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices). Only for part A did females have longer time scores than males. Test-retest reliability was high for each score.

Norms are provided for verbal and visuo-spatial immediate memory span, two tasks widely used in the clinical assessment of short-term memory and its neurological disorders. Data have been collected from 1355 male and female adult subjects, with various educational backgrounds and a 20-99 years age range. Span shows a major decrement after the late sixties and is affected by educational level. Male subjects score better on the spatial task. Data collected from 1112 male and female children, 4-to-10 year-old, show that span increases with age and boys score better on the spatial test.

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) what are the categories of category-specific deficits, and (2) is there an interaction between impairment for a type of knowledge (e.g., visual, functional, etc.) and impairment for a given category of objects (e.g., biological, artefacts, etc.). Of the 79 case studies in which the reported data are sufficiently informative with respect to the aims of our study, 61 presented a disproportionate impairment for biological categories and 18 presented a disproportionate impairment for artefacts. Less than half of the reported cases provide statistically and theoretically interpretable data. Each case is commented upon individually. The facts that emerge from our critical review are that (1) the categories of category-specific semantic deficits are animate objects, inanimate biological objects, and artefacts (the domain of biological objects fractionates into two independent semantic categories: animals, and fruit/vegetables); (2) the types of category-specific deficits are not associated with specific types of conceptual knowledge deficits. Other conclusions that emerge from our review are that the evidence in favour of the existence of cases of reliable category-specific agnosia or anomia is not very strong, and that the visual structural description system functions relatively autonomously from conceptual knowledge about object form.

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 both presentation modes significantly influenced the group means. However, 43% of the subjects failed to show at least one of the effects, and the likelihood that effects appeared was highly correlated with verbal memory span. In Experiment 2, 40 subjects of the original sample were retested, 20 of whom had failed to show one or more effects in Experiment 1. Whether or not an effect had appeared for individual subjects on the first test session was a poor predictor of whether the effect would appear on retest. Finally,an analysis of subject reports demonstrated that the patterns of experimental data could be accounted for in part by the strategies that subjects reported using, and the effect of strategy was independent of the effect of span. The implications of these findings for theories of verbal short-term memory are discussed.Current views as to the characteristics of verbal shortterm memory owe much to the discovery and exploration of the effects on immediate serial ordered recall of word length and phonological similarity. The word-length effect refers to the tendency for normal adult subjects to have more difficulty in immediate serial ordered recall of a sequence oflong words (e.g., university, aluminium, hippopotamus, refrigerator) than in that of a sequence of short words (e.g., scroll, switch, zinc, maths). The phonological similarity effect arises from the relative difficulty in serial ordered recall of phonologically similar items (e.g., man, mad, map, mat) compared with recall ofa sequence of items that are phonologically distinct (e.g., day, boy, sup,few). Word-length and phonological similarity effects appear whether the subjects read or listen to the word sequence for recall.These are robust effects that have been replicated widely with a range of materials using groups of normal subjects (e.g., Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975; Caplan, Ro-Part ofthe work on which this paper is based was supported by a travel grant given to the first author from the Trustees of the journal Brain. We are grateful to Alan Baddeley for very helpful discussions on this topic, and to Marc Marschark for useful discussions on the incidence of head injury in the college population. We are also grateful to Nelson Cowan

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 ranged in age between 60 and 80 years, and in formal education from 5 to 23 years. The global normal cognition was established in accordance with the Mini-Mental State Examination score and with the Prose Memory Test score (Spinnler and Tognoni, Ital J Neurol Sci 6:25-27, 1987). None of the participants had a history of psychiatric, neurological, cerebrovascular disorders or brain injury or took drugs affecting cognition. Linear regression analysis was performed to evaluate the potential effect of age, education and sex on the MoCA total performance score. We provide correction grids to adjust raw scores and equivalent scores with cut-off value to allow comparison between MoCA performance and others neuropsychological test scores that can be administered on the same subject.