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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Neuropsychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1412560
This article is part of the Research Topic Neuropsychological Testing: From Psychometrics to Clinical Neuropsychology View all 6 articles

Reliability and Minimal Detectable Change of the Yoni task for the Theory of Mind assessment

Provisionally accepted
Sara Isernia Sara Isernia 1Diego M. Cacciatore Diego M. Cacciatore 1FEDERICA ROSSETTO FEDERICA ROSSETTO 1*Cristian Ricci Cristian Ricci 2Francesca Baglio Francesca Baglio 1
  • 1 Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi Onlus (IRCCS), Milan, Italy
  • 2 North-West University, Potchefstroom, North West, South Africa

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The Theory of Mind (ToM) assessment is becoming essential to evaluate the response to a social cognition intervention and to monitor the progression of social abilities impairment in atypical conditions. In the Italian setting, the Yoni task has been recently validated in its short version (the Yoni-48 task) to evaluate ToM in the clinical setting. The present study aimed to verify the test-retest reliability and the Minimal Detectable Change (MDC) of the Yoni-48 task. The Yoni-48 task was administered to 229 healthy adults at two evaluation sessions three weeks apart (mean days between sessions = 20.35 ± 1.75) by a psychologist. The test-retest reliability of the Yoni-48 task accuracy and response time was tested by the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC2,1, two-way random model, absolute agreement type). Then, the MDC95 and MDC90 were computed based on the standard error of measurement. Finally, the 95% limits of agreement were plotted (LOA plot) to visualize the difference and mean score of each pair of measurements. The total Yoni-48 task accuracy, but not the response time score, showed a high ICC (> 0.80), with an MDC of 0.10. By plotting the LOA plot for the accuracy score no systematic trends were observed. This evidence will support the Yoni task adoption in longitudinal designs.

    Keywords: social cognition, Mentalizing, test-retest, Reliability, Rehabilitation

    Received: 05 Apr 2024; Accepted: 18 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Isernia, Cacciatore, ROSSETTO, Ricci and Baglio. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: FEDERICA ROSSETTO, Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi Onlus (IRCCS), Milan, Italy

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.