It has been well documented that education influences the individual's performance on category fluency tasks but it is still unclear how this effect may differ across the different types of category tasks (i.e., animals, fruits, vegetables and clothing). This study aims (1) to analyze the effect of the level of education on four different types of category fluency tasks among elder Hispanic Ame...

BACKGROUND The detection of early neuropsychological abnormalities as precursors of cognitive decline of vascular origin in patients with lacunar stroke is a subject of increasing interest. The objective of this study was to assess whether there were differences in the performance of a battery of neuropsychological tests in first-ever lacunar stroke patients with and without associated silent m...

Types of intervention that could be targeted when there are high rates of word-finding difficulty were examined for any impact they had on speech fluency (whole-word repetition rate in particular). Results are reported that are interpreted as showing that a semantic-based intervention has an impact on fluency as well as word-finding.

Semantic Fluency in Mild and Moderate Alzheimer’s Disease Seija Pekkala University of Helsinki, FIN Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by an impairment of the semantic memory responsible for processing meaning-related knowledge. This study was aimed at examining how Finnish-speaking healthy elderly subjects (n = 30) and mildly (n = 20) and moderately (n = 20) demented AD patients utilize...

Impairments in semantic fluency tasks are well-established in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). These are apparent both in quantitative measures, namely total number of items produced, and qualititative measures, namely the frequency with which AD patients switch between semantic clusters (e.g., from farm animals to African animals). Similar deficits have been seen in quantitative output of individuals...

Semantic fluency tasks have increasingly been used to probe the structure of human memory, adopting methodologies from the ecological foraging literature to describe memory as a trajectory through semantic space. Clusters of semantically related items are often produced together, and the transitions between these clusters of semantically related items are consistent with theories of optimal for...

In recent work exploring the semantic fluency task, we found evidence indicative of optimal foraging policies in memory search that mirror search in physical environments. We determined that a 2-stage cue-switching model applied to a memory representation from a semantic space model best explained the human data. Abbott, Austerweil, and Griffiths demonstrate how these patterns could also emerge...

The semantic verbal fluency task is broadly used in the neuropsychological assessment of elderly subjects. Even some studies have identified differences in verbal fluency clustering and switching measures between subjects with normal aging and a clinical condition such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease, the results are not always consistent. This study aimed to compare ...

The effect of exposure to an original or common idea on crowdsourced idea generation was studied by asking crowd workers to design a public service advertisement. As compared to having no idea exposure, exposure to an original idea decreased fluency and increased the average originality of ideas generated by each person. By contrast, exposure to a common idea had no effect on either idea origin...

BACKGROUND Impairment of higher cognitive functions in patients with schizophrenia might stem from perturbation of more basic functions, such as processing speed. Various clinical symptoms might affect cognitive efficiency as well. Notably, previous research has revealed the role of affective symptoms on memory performance in this population, and suggested sex-specific effects. METHOD We cond...