Neuropsychological Normed Measures for the Tinker Toy Test (TTT). Exploring Latent Structures

Executive Functions (EFs) have been identified as the ability to select and apply adaptive strategies for a broad spectrum of activities that imply goals formulation, planning and achievement. Their relevance to well-being and health becomes even more stringent in the light of the critical debate on the rise of chronic disease and the consequent a radical change in the World Health Organization (WHO) definition of health. The latter, defined by the WHO in 1948 as complete wellbeing, no longer suits societal needs as chronicity of some illnesses may still allow self-expression and realization, in spite of the mere fact that a certain medical maximum is unmet. In fact, the emphasis has shifted towards a new conceptualization of health, conceived as the ability to adapt and cope towards physical and psychological change. In this framework, EFs have been evaluated so far in several situations requiring adaptation of individuals to stressful situation, including employment settings. EFs have been studied in relation with several topics such as depression, attention deficits and hyperactivity disorders, in addition to the major field of brain lesions, the latter playing a key role in EFs assessment, due to the common adoption of neuropsychological tests in assessing EFs. In truth, these tests can turn out highly structured and therefore not always respondent to everyday life situations that go beyond experimental settings. A different approach informs the Tinker Toy Test (TTT), devised by Lezak in 1982 moving from a kids’ building block toy. In particular, the TTT proved promising in predicting return to work for brain-damaged subjects. In our work, we explore latent structures analysis for assessing psychometric properties of the TTT test, in the framework of Structural Equation Models (SEM), with respect to TTT scores from an Italian sample we had investigated previously for validation purposes. In fact, the latent variable approach has provided fruitful applications to validation itself, crucial for a battery of reliable, standardized and normed measures, the latter representing the perspective aim of our study.