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The speed of information processing is one of the most reliable indices of cognitive efficiency. The most common way to evaluate this ability is to assess reaction times (RTs). The technical limitations of previous tasks, aimed at measuring RT, have motivated us to develop a new battery for their evaluation. The aim of this study is to build an open-source, open-access reaction time test (OORTT), which has the following characteristics: rapid and easy administration, robust Italian normative data based on a wide age range, a simple scoring system, compatibility with all operating systems, no license or activation costs, and based on an open-source software platform. The battery is composed of three tasks: simple reaction times (SRT), Go/No-Go (GNG) condition, and four-position reaction times (4PRT). The battery was administered to 300 healthy participants aged between 14 and 89, and 3 groups of patients: 24 right brain-damaged; 21 left brain-damaged, and 19 degenerative cognitively impaired. We have developed specific norms for each task of the test battery: SRT, GNG, and 4PRT. Compared with healthy individuals, all groups obtained lower scores. More specifically, cognitively impaired patients obtained significantly longer RTs than healthy participants as well as unilateral brain-damaged patients. In the 4PRT task, right brain-damaged patients obtained a significantly left > right difference in RTs. In conclusion, the OORTT test battery proved to be a valuable tool which can be used in the clinical environment for cases of different attentional deficits after focal or degenerative brain damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the bidirectional influence between eating and mental activity, there is a growing interest in the neurosciences in the potential of food to influence mental states. Breakfast is the most investigated meal since it is supposed to influence satiety, mood and cognitive performance for the rest of the day. However, there is insufficient consistency among studies to draw firm conclusions about the short-term influence of carbohydrates and proteins on self-reported physiological state and mood. In order to shed light on this topic, 40 young Italian adults were involved in a single-blind randomized counterbalanced crossover experiment, in which we asked them to report on a series of visuo-analogue scales their physiological (i.e., hunger, tiredness and thirst) and affective states (i.e., happiness, excitement, activeness and relaxation) and perform 2 computer-administered cognitive tasks (simple reaction time and forward digit span) before and after having breakfast with a bitter espresso coffee and a whole wheat or a protein croissant. Our data show that breakfast improves the self-reported mood and physiological state, and also short-term verbal memory assessed by means of the forward digit span: we suppose that both croissants and caffeine played an important role in such findings. As for the reaction times, the whole wheat croissant intake determined slower reaction time compared with the protein croissant, maybe due to the higher glycemic response induced by carbohydrate ingestion. Confirming the bidirectional relationship between mind and food intake, the present findings are significant for nutrition science, since mood, physiological state and cognitive performance play a substantial role in general well-being as well as in eating behavior., (Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier Inc.)