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. They 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 the related neuropsychological tests. 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 Item Response Theory (IRT), with respect to TTT scores from an Italian sample we had investigated previously. As a matter of 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.