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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. This survey is based on data from 215 healthy Italian participants. Since males are more frequently reported to have a disproportionate impairment of biological categories, norms have also been separately calculated for males and females and for the two categories of man-made objects and biological entities. Besides providing new normative values based on the Equivalent Scores approach, this study reappraises the interaction between categorical dissociations and sex in the normal population, and discusses some methodological aspects concerning the use of statistical norms.

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 for normal males and females, for 288 animals, subdivided according to whether they were hunted/fished, or were used as food. The overall familiarity was almost identical between males and females. Males were more familiar with hunted animals, but for them also food animals were more familiar. There was not a consistent effect of hunting/fishing independently of the food/not food classification. The claim that males are generally more proficient with animals knowledge because most hunters/fishers are males seems rather simplistic, and the familiarity structure of the animals category is more complex. An evolution-based account is suggested for the category by sex interaction.

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 knowledge. The norms, obtained from 96 healthy Italian participants, allow normality/pathology judgements on the basis of one-sided tolerance limits, after adjusting the score of each test for the demographic variables of the proband subjects. We also report, as an example, use of the battery in a stroke patient; this patient was chosen because her lesion affected the left temporal–occipital cortex, an area sometimes associated with a deficit of colour processing. The patient resulted normal on colour perception and colour name retrieval, but defective on object colour knowledge probed using the stimulus name. For the sound definition of the functional locus of cognitive impairment at the single case level, a multi-faceted set of tasks is necessary.

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 indices: two directly expressing the age at which a picture was given the correct name by at least 75% of the subjects, and one expressing the overall percentage of our children who were correct in the task. (For the latter index, we provide separate values for boys and girls.). The correlation between objective indices of AoA and adult estimates culled from the literature was not very high. Moreover, objective indices showed low correlations with frequency and familiarity, in contrast to adult ratings. We conclude that adult estimates of AoA present validity problems and should be used with caution. The full set of stimuli is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

This study investigated the predictive value of the early progression rate of Alzheimer's disease on that of the later stages. We retrospectively evaluated 91 patients affected by possible Alzheimer's disease; the patients had been examined twice with the Milan overall dementia assessment (MODA) scale at an interval of 12 months (53 patients) or 24 months (38 patients). At the first assessment, speed of progression was calculated for each patient dividing the MODA difference from the normality threshold by the time elapsed from the cognitive decline onset. The second assessment of speed of progression was calculated dividing the difference between the two MODA scores by the time elapsed from the first examination. Patients with a slow progression rate in the early stage were unlikely to show a subsequent fast progression rate, and vice versa for patients with a fast early progression. A tool is provided for predicting the speed of cognitive decline of patients from a single MODA assessment. We suggest that, in future clinical trials on Alzheimer's disease, a stratification of participants based on the early rate of cognitive deterioration may be considered.

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 frontal tests (verbal fluency on phonemic cue and Trail Making Test (TMT)) and Raven's Matrices. Twenty-three normal subjects (12%) failed to correctly interpret the picture. We also examined 20 patients whose brain lesion encroached upon pre-frontal areas, in order to check if this version of the test could be easily administered to this type of patient, and if its difficulty level was appropriate for avoiding ceiling and floor effects. Twelve patients were unable to interpret the picture (60%). A similar failure rate was observed with the same subjects on verbal fluency and TMT, while Raven's Matrices were less impaired (35%). Some dissociation was found between Picture Interpretation and the TMT. The Italian version of the Picture Interpretation Test is suitable for the examination of pre-frontal patients.

A patient is described with a 5 year progressive defect of naming and auditory verbal comprehension, the pathological nature of which was presumably degenerative. The auditory comprehension defect unevenly affected different semantic categories, and was particularly severe for the names of animals, fruits and vegetables. The patients showed loss of the verbal knowledge of the physical attributes of the concepts corresponding to the words he was unable to understand, and sparing of the verbal knowledge of the functional attributes. His performance was defective also on the colour-figure and sound-picture matching test.

Visuoperceptual categorization was investigated in patients with unilateral brain damage by a task in which meaningless shapes had to be classified with reference to a number of prototype patterns. Right brain-damaged subjects with visual field defect turned out to have a narrower categorization span. As this outcome seems to be scarcely consonant with a lower level disorder of visual processing, a major competence of the right hemisphere is suggested for visuoperceptual categorization.