How many segments are there in an orange? Normative data for the new Cognitive Estimation Task in an Italian population

The Cognitive Estimation Test (CET) is widely used by clinicians to assess frontal executive dysfunction. In the present work, the Italian standardization of a new version of the CET is provided. This version consists of two 9-item parallel forms (A and B) that were administered to two hundred and twenty-seven healthy Italian male and female participants aged between 19 and 91 years with 5-24 years of full-time education. Performance on the CET was not related to age or level of education; both forms showed a male CET advantage. The new CET is a useful tool for clinicians and researchers to administer the CET more than once without practice effects, which is considered important when assessing frontal executive abilities

Bringing the Cognitive Estimation Task into the 21st Century: Normative Data on Two New Parallel Forms

The Cognitive Estimation Test (CET) is widely used by clinicians and researchers to assess the ability to produce reasonable cognitive estimates. Although several studies have published normative data for versions of the CET, many of the items are now outdated and parallel forms of the test do not exist to allow cognitive estimation abilities to be assessed on more than one occasion. In the present study, we devised two new 9-item parallel forms of the CET. These versions were administered to 184 healthy male and female participants aged 18–79 years with 9–22 years of education. Increasing age and years of education were found to be associated with successful CET performance as well as gender, intellect, naming, arithmetic and semantic memory abilities. To validate that the parallel forms of the CET were sensitive to frontal lobe damage, both versions were administered to 24 patients with frontal lobe lesions and 48 age-, gender- and education-matched controls. The frontal patients’ error scores were significantly higher than the healthy controls on both versions of the task. This study provides normative data for parallel forms of the CET for adults which are also suitable for assessing frontal lobe dysfunction on more than one occasion without practice effects

Attentional deficits in Alzheimer’s: investigating the role of acetylcholine with computational modelling

Attention is a very important cognitive process that is employed for many actions in our everydaylife (e.g. watching television, reading a paper, washing our face, eatingand so on). It is therefore essential to investigate further the underlying mechanisms inneuro-degenerativeconditions, like Alzheimer’s disease, in which ourattentional abilities are reduced(Festa, Heindel, & Ott, 2010; Foster, Behrmann, & Stuss, 1999; Hao et al., 2005; Porter, Tales, et al., 2010; Redel et al., 2012; A. Tales et al., 2002a; Vallejo et al., 2016).Alzheimer’s disease is a condition that can take severalyears if not decades from the time it starts to the time the full symptoms are shown (Tijms & Visser, 2018).In those years of disease progression,there are a number of pathological processes that are taking place, however one of the starting point of the pathologyis believed to be the aggregation of βamyloids into plaques(Gordon et al., 2018; Tijms & Visser, 2018). Irrespective ofthe amount of research that has taken place,manyquestionsremain on how the disease unfolds and how to identify individual’s position in the disease’s trajectory(Gordon et al., 2018; Ryman et al., 2014)