On 7 August, an international team from the Netherlands and the UK published a validation of the Dutch Hinting Task (HT-NL) for assessing Theory of Mind in dementia in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society. The authors report acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s α=0.74), lower HT-NL scores in all dementia groups versus controls, and poorer performance in behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) than in Alzheimer’s disease; discriminative ability was excellent (AUC=0.83), comparable to an emotion-recognition test, with correlations to emotion recognition (r=0.45) and to memory and language (r=0.31–0.40), but not to processing speed, executive function or working memory (r=0.00–0.17).
The study included 66 patients (22 bvFTD, 21 primary progressive aphasia, 23 Alzheimer’s disease) and 99 healthy controls. Analyses compared groups, corrected for multiple testing, tested how well the task separates patients from controls, and checked links with other cognitive tests. Preliminary reference values are included. Limitations include heterogeneity across dementia types, a cross-sectional design that prevents assessing change over time, and the lack of comparison with other Theory of Mind measures; HT-NL performance also partly depends on memory and language. Despite this, results support routine assessment of social cognition in dementia. The article has been published open access and can be read here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617725101197