The impairment of awareness for cognitive and motor abilities affects the efficacy of medical rehabilitation of patients with focal brain damage and requires timely detection. However, there still are no domestic methods to diagnose such disorders. The aim of our study was to develop a standardized method to assess unawareness for motor and cognitive abilities in brain damaged patients, based on a comparison of predicted and actual performance of simple tasks. Two questionnaires for the measurement of self-reported abilities to carry out motor and cognitive tasks and two corresponding objective rating subscales for the actual performance of the same tasks were created. 100 healthy persons were examined. Each questionnaire and objective rating subscale had acceptable psychometric characteristics according to Rasch analysis. Awareness deficit for motor abilities and cognitive abilities was measured as the discrepancies between self-anticipated and observed performance of motor and cognitive tasks, and two corresponding scales were composed. Cut-off points were proposed as criteria of pathological underestimation and the pathological overestimation of motor abilities and cognitive abilities. Both discrepancy scores had a normal distribution, so they were converted to z-scores on the basis of normative data. The use of the proposed scales in 30 ischemic stroke patients confirms their criterial validity as a measure of unawareness of motor and cognitive abilities.
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