The tool

Free and cued recall — the patient recalls a learned list, first spontaneously, then with a semantic cue.

Span, encoding, free and cued recall, recognition. The benefit gained from cueing separates an encoding disorder from a retrieval disorder, and it is this distinction that directs the work.

Naming — the patient produces the word matching the picture; the effect of the phonological cue is recorded.

Naming, fluency, repetition, lexical and syntactic comprehension. The type of error locates the impairment along the word-retrieval chain: semantic paraphasia, phonemic paraphasia and circumlocution do not point to the same level.

Gap-fill text — the patient fills the gaps by drawing on the semantic and syntactic constraints of the context.

Grapheme decoding, lexical reading, phoneme–grapheme transcription, spelling, copying and oral spelling. Comparing the reading and writing of the same word separates impairment of the lexical route from impairment of the phonological route.

Go / No-Go — the patient responds to targets and must withhold the response to non-targets; the ratio sets the inhibitory load.

Inhibition, mental flexibility, planning, updating in working memory. Commission errors point to an inhibition deficit, perseverations to a flexibility deficit: two profiles that do not call for the same exercise.

Cancellation — the patient marks every target among distractors, and the distribution of omissions is recorded.

Visual scanning, focused attention, vigilance, dual task, hemispace exploration. The pattern of omissions sheds light on how scanning is organised and reveals any hemispatial asymmetry.

Object recognition — the same object is presented in several forms, from photograph to silhouette.

Recognition of objects, shapes, colours, faces and sounds. The presentation gradient — photograph, drawing, non-canonical view, silhouette — isolates the level of perceptual processing affected.

Gesture imitation — the patient reproduces a posture or a sequence shown, without verbal instruction.

Gesture imitation, action sequences, spatial construction. The challenge is to distinguish what belongs to the motor programme from what belongs to the representation of the gesture.

Line bisection — the patient marks the middle of the segment; the deviation from the true midpoint is measured.

Spatial orientation, distance estimation, line bisection, visuomotor skills, ocular pursuit. A systematic deviation of the subjective midpoint indicates neglect, and its amplitude gives the severity.

Money handling — the patient makes up a sum, gives change, checks change received.

Transcoding, mental and written calculation, estimation, counting, money handling. Moving from digit to word, and back again, is often impaired independently of calculation itself.

Telling the time — analogue or digital clock face, with conversion from one format to the other.

Temporal and spatial reference points, chronology, telling the time. The last of these draws simultaneously on temporal orientation, spatial processing and number transcoding, which makes it a less simple task than it appears.

Emotion recognition — the patient matches a facial expression to the emotion it conveys.

Emotion identification, comprehension of inferences, idiomatic expressions, attribution of mental states. A literal response to a figurative expression indicates a pragmatic deficit.

Non-fluent aphasia · Expressive aphasia · Motor aphasia

Acquired language disorder following a left frontal lesion. Output is reduced, agrammatic and effortful, with comprehension relatively preserved. Awareness of the disorder is often retained, a source of frustration.

Fluent aphasia · Receptive aphasia · Sensory aphasia

Language disorder caused by a left temporal lesion. Production is fluent but paraphasic and jargon-laden; oral comprehension is severely impaired. Anosognosia is frequent.

Anomia · Word-finding difficulty

Predominant word-finding difficulty, with fluent speech scattered with circumlocutions and pauses. Comprehension is preserved.

Mild AD · Early dementia · Advanced MCI

Predominant impairment of episodic memory with early temporal disorientation. Independence broadly preserved. Emerging word-finding difficulty.

Moderate AD

Extension to the instrumental functions — language, praxis, gnosis. Marked temporo-spatial disorientation. Partial dependence.

USN · Spatial neglect · Visuospatial hemineglect · Unilateral neglect

Failure to orient attention towards the contralesional hemispace, most often the left after a right parietal lesion. Not explained by a primary sensory deficit.

TBI · Head injury · Acquired brain injury

Frequent diffuse damage affecting processing speed, attention, working memory and executive functions. Associated behavioural and pragmatic disorders.

Attention deficit disorder · ADD · ADHD

Persistent attention disorder with or without hyperactivity. Inhibition deficit, distractibility, difficulties with self-regulation and planning.

Frontal syndrome · Executive function disorder

Impairment of the control functions — planning, inhibition, flexibility, initiation. Often follows a frontal or fronto-subcortical lesion.

Cerebrovascular accident · CVA

Period of maximal spontaneous recovery (1 to 6 months). Presentation varies with the territory affected. Optimal window of plasticity for intensive rehabilitation.

Apraxia of object use

Inability to organise the sequence of actions needed to use objects or carry out a complex activity, despite preserved motor abilities.

Gestural apraxia

Difficulty producing a gesture on verbal command or by imitation, while the automatic gesture is preserved.

Apperceptive agnosia · Associative agnosia

Disorder of visual object recognition without elementary sensory impairment or intellectual disorder. May be apperceptive or associative.

Face agnosia

Specific inability to recognise familiar faces, with recognition preserved through the voice or other cues.

Acquired dyscalculia · Calculation disorder

Acquired disorder of number processing and calculation, which may affect transcoding, arithmetic facts or procedures.

Specific written-language disorder · SLD

Lasting disorder in the acquisition of reading and spelling despite normal intelligence and adequate schooling.

Social communication disorder

Difficulty using language in social context — inferences, figurative meaning, turn-taking, adjusting to the interlocutor.

FTD · Pick’s disease

Predominantly frontal and/or temporal damage with behavioural disorders, disinhibition, apathy or primary progressive aphasia depending on the variant.

PD · Parkinsonian syndrome

Motor impairment with frequent cognitive disorders — slowing, dysexecutive features, visuospatial difficulties. Fluctuations linked to medication.

MS

Cognitive impairment present in 40 to 65% of patients — slowed processing, attention, working memory, executive functions.

MCI

Objectively measured cognitive decline greater than expected for age, without significant impact on independence. Risk of progression to dementia.

Severely impaired repetition with fluent production and preserved comprehension. Phonemic paraphasias and repeated attempts to approximate the target word.

Attention · visual modality

The patient explores an array of stimuli and marks every target among distractors. The pattern of omissions sheds light on how visual scanning is organised and reveals any hemispatial asymmetry. Completion time and exploration strategy are as informative as the number of errors.

Executive functions · visual · auditory · bimodal modalities

The patient responds quickly to target stimuli and must inhibit the response to non-targets. The Go/No-Go ratio sets the prepotency of the response and thus the inhibitory load. Commission errors indicate an inhibition deficit, omissions an attentional deficit.

Executive functions · visual modality

The patient names the ink colour of a word that denotes a different colour, and must inhibit automatic reading. The interference effect — the difference between congruent and incongruent conditions — quantifies cognitive control.

Memory · auditory · visual modalities

The patient reproduces a sequence of items of increasing length, in forward order (storage) or backward order (manipulation). Forward span assesses the capacity of the phonological loop or the visuospatial sketchpad; backward span calls on the central executive.

Memory · visual · auditory modalities

The patient indicates whether the current stimulus matches the one presented N positions earlier. Places intense demands on the continuous updating of working-memory content. Load adjustable through the parameter N.

Spoken language · visual modality

The patient produces the word matching a picture. The type of error guides the diagnosis: semantic paraphasia (semantic system), phonemic paraphasia (phonological access), circumlocution (lexical access). The effect of phonemic cueing differentiates word-finding difficulty from semantic loss.

Spoken language · visual · auditory · bimodal modalities

The patient selects the picture matching a heard or read word, among semantic, phonological or visual distractors. The nature of the distractor chosen indicates the level of processing affected.

Memory · visual · bimodal modalities

The patient sorts items by taxonomic or functional criteria. Assesses the integrity and organisation of semantic networks as well as categorical flexibility. Errors reveal the granularity of the semantic impairment.

Written language · written · bimodal modalities

The patient fills the gaps in a text by drawing on the semantic, syntactic or phonological constraints of the context. Assesses contextual integration and lexical availability.

Written language · auditory modality

The patient transcribes an auditory stimulus. Comparing regular words, irregular words and non-words dissociates the phonological route from the lexical route.

Written language · visual modality

The patient reproduces a written model. Isolates the motor and visuoconstructive component of writing, independently of orthographic encoding.

Written language · auditory · written modalities

The patient spells a word aloud letter by letter, or recognises a word spelled out. Calls on the graphemic buffer and verbal working memory.

Visuospatial skills · visual modality

The patient marks the subjective midpoint of a horizontal segment. A systematic rightward deviation indicates left neglect; the amplitude of the deviation is proportional to severity.

Attention · visual modality

The patient locates one or more target items in a complex, ecological scene. Assesses systematic scanning, selective attention and coverage of the visual field in a context close to everyday life.

Memory · visual modality

The patient compares two versions of the same scene and identifies the changes. Calls on visual short-term memory, attention to detail and systematic comparison.

Executive functions · visual modality

The patient orders a series of pictures showing the steps of an action or a story. Assesses the action-script representation, planning and temporal logic.

Spoken language · written · visual modalities

The patient restores the order of the constituents of a scrambled sentence. Assesses morphosyntactic skills and verbal working memory.

Memory · visual · bimodal modalities

The patient turns over cards to reconstitute pairs. Calls on visuospatial memory, incidental encoding and search strategy.

Memory · auditory · visual modalities

The patient recalls a learned list, first spontaneously then with semantic cueing. The benefit of cueing differentiates an encoding/storage disorder (hippocampal, insensitive to cues) from a retrieval disorder (frontal, sensitive to cues).

Memory · visual · auditory modalities

The patient identifies previously presented items among distractors. Less demanding than recall — allows encoding and retrieval to be dissociated.

Orientation · visual modality

The patient reads the time on an analogue or digital clock face, or converts from one format to the other. Draws on temporal orientation, spatial processing and number transcoding.

Numerical cognition · auditory · written modalities

The patient solves operations without written support. Draws on memorised arithmetic facts, calculation procedures and working memory.

Numerical cognition · visual modality

The patient recognises money, counts it or gives change. A highly ecological task assessing transcoding, calculation and functional independence.

Social cognition · visual modality

The patient identifies the emotion expressed by a face, or matches a face to an emotional label. Assesses the decoding of facial cues and access to the emotional lexicon.

Social cognition · auditory · written · visual modalities

The patient accesses the figurative meaning of a non-compositional expression. Assesses pragmatic processing and interpretative flexibility. Literal responses indicate a pragmatic deficit.

Spoken language · visual · auditory modalities

The patient answers factual, quantitative or inferential questions about an observed scene. Assesses comprehension, attention to detail and inference in an ecological context.

Executive functions · visual modality

The patient identifies the absurd or anachronistic elements in a scene. Calls on reasoning, world knowledge and inhibition of the default interpretation.

Visuospatial skills · visual modality

The patient follows a moving target with eye or hand. Assesses smooth ocular pursuit and visuomotor coordination.

Attention · visual modality

The patient connects targets in a set order (TMT-A: numbers) or alternating (TMT-B: numbers/letters). The B−A differential isolates mental flexibility from processing speed.

Executive functions · visual modality

The patient moves discs under constrained rules to reproduce a target configuration. Assesses planning, anticipation and rule observance.

Written language · written · visual modalities

The patient guesses a word by proposing letters, with or without a semantic or visual cue. Draws on the orthographic lexicon, metaphonology and deductive reasoning.

Praxis · visual modality

The patient reproduces an observed gesture, symbolic or not. Assesses ideomotor praxis independently of verbal command.

Gnosis · visual modality

The patient identifies objects presented in different forms — photograph, drawing, non-canonical view, silhouette. The difficulty gradient isolates the level of perceptual processing affected.

Gnosis · auditory modality

The patient identifies environmental sounds or instruments. Assesses auditory gnosis independently of language.

Memory · visual modality

The patient memorises then restores the location of objects in a space. Assesses the visuospatial sketchpad and spatial short-term memory.

Visuospatial skills · visual · auditory modalities

The patient places an object according to a spatial instruction — on top, between, to the left. Assesses the comprehension of spatial relations and their motor execution.

Spoken language · auditory · written modalities

The patient generates words belonging to a semantic category or beginning with a letter. Categorical fluency is more sensitive to semantic impairment, phonemic fluency to executive impairment.

Spoken language · auditory modality

The patient judges whether two similar auditory stimuli are identical or different. Assesses fine phonological discrimination, a prerequisite for any lexical work.

Numerical cognition · visual modality

The patient enumerates the elements of a collection. Draws on the cardinality principle, systematic pointing and working memory.

Cross-domain · visual · auditory · bimodal modalities

Presentation of visual, auditory or bimodal stimuli with no response required. Serves as priming, arousal or familiarisation before an active task.

Spoken language · visual · bimodal modalities

A prime stimulus facilitates the processing of a related target stimulus. Exploits the automatic activation of semantic networks, preserved even when access is impaired.

Written language · visual modality

Words are displayed one at a time at a controlled pace. Forces rapid lexical processing without eye scanning, isolating lexical access from visual exploration.

Memory · visual · auditory modalities

The patient identifies the element that does not belong to a set. Assesses abstraction of the shared criterion and categorical flexibility.

Gnosis · visual modality

The patient distinguishes real objects from impossible assemblages. Assesses access to the structural representations stored in visual memory.

Cross-domain · visual modality

The patient positions a cursor on a continuum. Used for self-assessment or numerical estimation.

Praxis · auditory · visual modalities

The patient reproduces a rhythmic structure heard or seen. Draws on sequential auditory memory and temporal motor programming.

Numerical cognition · visual modality

The patient balances two trays by manipulating quantities. A concrete support for the notion of equality and for calculation.

Memory · auditory · written modalities

The patient answers questions about decontextualised knowledge. Assesses the integrity of semantic and cultural memory.