This study aimed at investigating the clinical usefulness of the Mental Deterioration Battery (MDB) in the neuropsychological diagnosis and characterization of the dementia syndrome. In this paper, we report: (a) normative data for various test scores derived from the analysis of performance of 340 normal subjects living in urban areas; (b) an evaluation of the reliability of the single tests and of the battery as a whole in differentiating normal subjects from patients affected by cognitive deterioration derived from the analysis of performance of 130 normal subjects living in rural areas and 134 patients affected by probable Alzheimer’s dementia; (c) a cluster analysis of performances of the 340 normal subjects in the standardization group to evaluate possible criteria of homogeneity according to which the various MDB scores tend to aggregate; (d) an analysis of performance profiles of 183 patients with right monohemispheric focal lesions, 159 patients with left unilateral lesions with aphasia and 131 left-lesioned nonaphasic patients to evaluate the specificity of the single tests of the battery in documenting a selective impairment of one of the two cerebral hemispheres. Results confirm the reliability of the MBD in discriminating between normal and demented patients and provide indications for use of the battery in differentiating qualitative patterns of cognitive impairment.

The Digit span and Corsi span tasks are frequently used to assess verbal and visuo-spatial short-term memory. Forward versions of these tasks, in which sequences of items of increasing length have to be reproduced in the order they were presented, are believed to primarily evaluate the functioning of the working memory material-specific slave systems (i.e. the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad for verbal and visuo-spatial data, respectively). The backward versions of both tasks, in which sequences of items have to be reproduced in the reverse order, are believed to primarily tax Central Executive resources. Here, we report normative data on the forward and backward versions of the Digit span and Corsi span tasks that was collected from 362 healthy Italians ranging in age from 20 to 90 years. The results show a decremental effect of age on performance in all tasks and an ameliorative effect of education in all tasks except the Corsi span backwards. We provide correction grids for age and literacy that derive from results of the regression analyses.

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