Digital MULTIMAP: a standardization of objects and actions naming task in a french population

Picture naming is a widely used task for perioperative language assessment and brain mapping in awake surgery for brain tumors. Although there is a consensus on this task between centers performing this type of surgery, the tests used vary from one team to another. The MULTIMAP picture naming task, initially developed in 2021 by the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, aimed to enhance the perioperative assessment of lexical access of both nouns and verbs in awake surgery patients and to facilitate standardized protocols for international multicenter studies. This study presents the French adaptation, digitization, and standardization of extraoperative MULTIMAP.

The tool was standardized on a sample of 416 healthy subjects recruited from the French population, whose performances (score and time) were statistically analyzed. Of the 100 items tested, we retained the 80 (40 objects, 40 actions) that showed the highest naming accuracy and were balanced between nouns and verbs for main psycholinguistic variables.

Gender had no effect on performance, the level of education had a significant effect for the action naming task only, and age for both tasks, allowing to determine percentiles according to these variables. Performances in object and action naming were correlated; however, a significant but minimal difference between the average score and time between tasks was found.

The digitized French version of MULTIMAP is a promising tool, that awaits further validation in patients with acquired brain lesions, especially in the context of brain tumor awake surgery.