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.

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a rapid screening battery, also including subtests to assess frontal functions such as set-shifting, abstraction and cognitive flexibility. MoCA seems to be useful to identify non-amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and subcortical dementia; it has high sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing MCI from mild Alzheimer's Disease. Previous studies revealed that certain items of MoCA may be culturally biased and highlighted the need for population-based norms for the MoCA. The aim of present study was to collect normative values in a sample of Italian healthy subjects. Four hundred and fifteen Italian healthy subjects (252 women and 163 men) of different ages (age range 21-95 years) and educational level (from primary to university) underwent MoCA and Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE). Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that age and education significantly influenced performance on MoCA. No significant effect of gender was found. From the derived linear equation, a correction grid for MoCA raw scores was built. Inferential cut-off score, estimated using a non-parametric technique, is 15.5 and equivalent scores were computed. Correlation analysis showed a significant but weak correlation between MoCA adjusted scores with MMSE adjusted scores (r = 0.43, p < 0.001). The present study provided normative data for the MoCA in an Italian population useful for both clinical and research purposes.

Three prosopagnosic patients were given four face tests, two perceptual (an unknown face identification test and an age estimation test) and two also implying memory (a familiarity check test and a famous face recognition test). The patients' performance was assessed with reference to the score distribution of the normal population. A patient was found to fail both perceptual and mnestic tests, without any noticeable difference between them. Also the second patient had poor scores on both kinds of tests, but his impairment was significantly greater on the perceptual ones. The third patient, on the contrary, showed no perceptual deficit and only failed the mnestic tests. His inability to recognize the individuality of an item among members of the same category was strictly confined to faces and never present for other classes of stimuli (cars, coins, personal belongings). This finding is supportive of the thesis that in a few patients the deficit underlying prosopagnosia is face specific.

We aimed at verifying the hypothesis that facial mimicry is causally and selectively involved in emotion recognition. For this purpose, in Experiment 1, we explored the effect of tonic contraction of muscles in upper or lower half of participants' face on their ability to recognize emotional facial expressions. We found that the "lower" manipulation specifically impaired recognition of happiness and disgust, the "upper" manipulation impaired recognition of anger, while both manipulations affected recognition of fear; recognition of surprise and sadness were not affected by either blocking manipulations. In Experiment 2, we verified whether emotion recognition is hampered by stimuli in which an upper or lower half-face showing an emotional expression is combined with a neutral half-face. We found that the neutral lower half-face interfered with recognition of happiness and disgust, whereas the neutral upper half impaired recognition of anger; recognition of fear and sadness was impaired by both manipulations, whereas recognition of surprise was not affected by either manipulation. Taken together, the present findings support simulation models of emotion recognition and provide insight into the role of mimicry in comprehension of others' emotional facial expressions.

We performed a clinical study to evaluate the unawareness of dyskinesias in patients affected by Parkinson's disease (PD) and Huntington's disease (HD). Thirteen PD patients with levodopa-induced dyskinesias and 9 HD patients were enrolled. Patients were asked to evaluate the presence of dyskinesias while performing specific motor tasks. The Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale (AIMS) and Goetz dyskinesia rating scale were administered to determine the severity of dyskinesias. The Unified Parkinson's disease rating scale (UPDRS) and Unified Huntington's Disease Rating Scale (UHDRS) were used in PD and HD patients, respectively. In PD we found a significant negative relationship between unawareness score at standing and AIMS score and between unawareness score at hand pronation-supination and AIMS score for upper limbs. In HD we found a significant positive relationship between total unawareness score and UHDRS score and between total unawareness score and disease duration. In PD the unawareness seems to be inversely related with severity of dyskinesias, while in HD it is directly related to disease duration and severity.

The theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions different from one's own. The aim of the study was to explore the neuropsychological correlates of theory of mind in patients affected by early Parkinson's disease (PD). Thirty-three PD patients and 33 age-, sex-, and education-matched control subjects underwent the Frontal Assessment Battery, as well as tasks assessing "cognitive" and "affective" theory of mind, and memory abilities; questionnaires evaluating behavioral disorders and quality of life were also administrated. Although the 2 groups did not differ on neuropsychological tasks, PD patients' performance on tasks assessing cognitive and affective theory of mind was significantly worse than controls. Moreover, PD patients had more behavioral disorders and worse quality of life than controls. After covarying for behavioral and quality of life scores, the differences between patients and controls on theory of mind tasks remained significant. "Cognitive" theory of mind was associated with Frontal Assessment Battery score and 2 domains of quality of life scale, whereas "affective" theory of mind scores correlated only with behavioral scales such as the Frontal Behavioral Inventory and Apathy Evaluation Scale. The results demonstrate that both affective and cognitive aspects of theory of mind are simultaneously impaired in early PD and suggest that deficits in the 2 subcomponents of theory of mind may be linked to dysfunction of different frontosubcortical circuitries in early PD.

Interoception is the basic process enabling evaluation of one's own bodily states. Several previous studies suggested that altered interoception might be related to disorders in the ability to perceive and express emotions, i.e., alexithymia, and to defects in perceiving and describing one's own health status, i.e., hypochondriasis. The main aim of the present study was to investigate the relationships between alexithymic trait and interoceptive abilities evaluated by the “Self-Awareness Questionnaire” (SAQ), a novel self-report tool for assessing interoceptive awareness. Two hundred and fifty healthy subjects completed the SAQ, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 items (TAS-20), and a questionnaire to assess hypochondriasis, the Illness Attitude Scale (IAS). The SAQ showed a two-factor structure, with good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.88). We observed significant direct correlations between SAQ, TAS-20 and two of its subscales, and the IAS. Regression analysis confirmed that the difficulty in identifying and expressing emotions is significantly related with awareness for one's own interoceptive feelings and with a tendency to misinterpret and amplify bodily sensations. From a clinical point of view, the assessment of interoceptive awareness by the SAQ could be pivotal in evaluating several psychopathological conditions, such as the somatoform disorders.

Do spatial operations on mental images and those on visually presented material share the same neural substrate? We used the high spatial resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine whether areas in the parietal lobe that have been implicated in the spatial transformation of visual percepts are also activated during the generation and spatial analysis of imagined objects. Using a behaviourally controlled mental imagery paradigm, which did not involve any visual stimulation, we found robust activation in posterior parietal cortex in both hemispheres. We could thus identify the subset of spatial analysis-related activity that is involved in spatial operations on mental images in the absence of external visual input. This result clarifies the nature of top-down processes in the dorsal stream of the human cerebral cortex and provides evidence for a specific convergence of the pathways of imagery and visual perception within the parietal lobes.