This measure, rated by care staff, incorporates sub-scales assessing mood (9 items), self-care (10 items), sensory abilities (2 items), memory and orientation (9 items), mobility (1 item) and challenging behaviour (5 items).
The seven multi-item scales were first contact and continuity (6 items); comprehensiveness (medical care) (4 items); comprehensiveness (social care) (3 items); first contact (access) (2 items); coordination (2 items); family centeredness (5 items); and community orientation (4 items).
Four questions elicited information about individual behaviours for performance with a number of sub-items as follows; proficiency behaviour (five items); adaptive behaviours (four items); proactive behaviours (four items) and client orientation behaviours (ten items).
Cognitive status was evaluated according to five items: recall, speech, and orientation to time, space and people.
The general practitioner assessment of cognition (GPCOG) combines the clock-drawing test with items assessing recall and orientation; its sensitivity was 85% and specificity 86% [ 20].
This strongly suggests that memory for isolated aspects of each item (locations and orientations, respectively in our experiments) were unimpaired.
Therefore, difficulties with the subtest components that are a part this second factor, which is associated with both episodic and semantic memory, appear to be associated with the borderline (delayed recall item) and moderate (orientation item) stages in the progression of dementia.
This has been reported in a number of attentional demanding visual tasks, such as object tacking [12], short-term memory for spatial locations [13], item identification [14] and orientation discrimination and detection [15] among other visual tasks.
Furthermore, Beck and Kastner [19] recorded hemodynamic brain responses for stimulus arrays in which a single item differed in color and orientation from its surrounding three items (i.e., homogeneous 'pop-out' displays), compared to when all four items differed in color and orientation from each other (heterogeneous displays).
To explore this possibility, we created a dichotomous variable called "never in state to do orientation items" and coded as a) missing data for all orientation items and b) data on at least one orientation item.
