TABLE 2.

Areas of agreement and disagreement among the included reviews

Areas of agreement	Areas of disagreement
All agree that validated tests that can be used to examine the effects of nutrition do exist.	Discrepant findings regarding the most sensitive domain.
All give similar “well -known” tasks as examples.	Disagreement over whether it is possible to establish a “guiding taxonomy,” and the usefulness of this approach.
All agree that a paradigm utility, validity, and reliability are the minimal requirement.	Different taxonomies were used for the purpose of different reviews.
All agree that test sensitivity to diet/nutraceuticals (acute or long-term effects) (for example, from previous literature/animal research) is critical and should be a paramount consideration in test selection.	No agreement over how cognitive tests should be combined.
All agree that tasks should be tailored to the target population (that is, avoid ceiling/floor effects, for example MMSE).	No agreement on the number of cognitive tests to be used: due to overlap between domains, some suggest that a comprehensive battery be used; others prefer to emphasis risk of false positives.
	No agreement on the usefulness of “global cognition” measures.
Other factors
Specific issues discussed in some papers are ignored by others (for example, neural mechanisms, biological plausibility, ecological validity, normative data, whether animal research is a useful basis, power, under-represented domains, speed/accuracy trade-off, simultaneous measurement of mood/arousal/motivation, test-retest variability, practice, preregistration, other individual differences such as culture/language, and conceptual confusion).	Only one factor seemed to change in the literature over time: computerized testing was mentioned as a primary way forward in earlier reviews, but this was not mentioned in later reviews.

MMSE, Mini-Mental State Examination.