Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T07:48:04.476Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Patients with amnestic MCI Fail to Adapt Executive Control When Repeatedly Tested with Semantic Verbal Fluency Tasks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2021

Johannes Tröger ,
Hali Lindsay ,
Mario Mina ,
Nicklas Linz ,
Stefan Klöppel ,
Jutta Kray  and
Jessica Peter Open the ORCID record for Jessica Peter [Opens in a new window]
Johannes Tröger
Affiliation:
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany Ki elements, Saarbrücken, Germany
Hali Lindsay
Affiliation:
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany
Mario Mina
Affiliation:
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany
Nicklas Linz
Affiliation:
Ki elements, Saarbrücken, Germany
Stefan Klöppel
Affiliation:
University Hospital of Old Age Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Jutta Kray
Affiliation:
Chair for Development of Language, Learning & Action, Department of Psychology, University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany
Jessica Peter*
Affiliation:
University Hospital of Old Age Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
*
*Correspondence and reprint requests to: Jessica Peter, PhD, University Hospital of Old Age Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Bern, Bolligenstrasse 111, CH-3000 Bern 60, +41 31 932 89 03, Bern, Switzerland. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Objective:

Semantic verbal fluency (SVF) tasks require individuals to name items from a specified category within a fixed time. An impaired SVF performance is well documented in patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI). The two leading theoretical views suggest either loss of semantic knowledge or impaired executive control to be responsible.

Method:

We assessed SVF 3 times on 2 consecutive days in 29 healthy controls (HC) and 29 patients with aMCI with the aim to answer the question which of the two views holds true.

Results:

When doing the task for the first time, patients with aMCI produced fewer and more common words with a shorter mean response latency. When tested repeatedly, only healthy volunteers increased performance. Likewise, only the performance of HC indicated two distinct retrieval processes: a prompt retrieval of readily available items at the beginning of the task and an active search through semantic space towards the end. With repeated assessment, the pool of readily available items became larger in HC, but not patients with aMCI.

Conclusion:

The production of fewer and more common words in aMCI points to a smaller search set and supports the loss of semantic knowledge view. The failure to improve performance as well as the lack of distinct retrieval processes point to an additional impairment in executive control. Our data did not clearly favour one theoretical view over the other, but rather indicates that the impairment of patients with aMCI in SVF is due to a combination of both.

Keywords

Semantic verbal fluencyAmnestic MCITemporal analysisSemantic lossExecutive controlPractice effects
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 28 , Issue 6 , July 2022 , pp. 620 - 627
Copyright
Copyright © INS. Published by Cambridge University Press, 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Amunts, J., Camilleri, J.A., Eickhoff, S.B., Heim, S., & Weis, S. (2020). Executive functions predict verbal fluency scores in healthy participants. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 1–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Auriacombe, S., Lechevallier, N., Amieva, H., Harston, S., Raoux, N., and Dartigues, J.-F. (2006). A Longitudinal Study of Quantitative and Qualitative Features of Category Verbal Fluency in Incident Alzheimer’s Disease Subjects: Results from the PAQUID Study. Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, 21(4), 260–266.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boersma, P., and Weenink, D. (2001). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer Software].Google Scholar
Brandt, J., & Manning, K.J. (2009). Patterns of word-list generation in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 23, 870–879.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carson, N., Leach, L., & Murphy, K.J. (2018). A re-examination of Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) cutoff scores. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 33(2), 379–388.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, D.G., McLaughlin, P.M., Woo, E., Hwang, K., Hurtz, S., Ramirez, L., … Apostolova, L.G. (2016). Novel verbal fluency scores and structural brain imaging for prediction of cognitive outcome in mild cognitive impairment. Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, 2, 113–122.Google ScholarPubMed
Cooper, D.B., Lacritz, L.H., Weiner, M.F., Rosenberg, R.N., & Cullum, C.M. (2004). Category fluency in mild cognitive impairment: reduced effect of practice in test-retest conditions. Alzheimer Disease & Associated Disorders, 18(3), 120–122.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Duff, K., Beglinger, L.J., Van Der Heiden, S., Moser, D.J., Arndt, S., Schultz, S.K., & Paulsen, J.S. (2008). Short-term practice effects in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: implications for diagnosis and treatment. International Psychogeriatrics, 20(5), 986–999.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Duff, K., Lyketsos, C.G., Beglinger, L.J., Chelune, G., Moser, D.J., Arndt, S., … McCaffrey, R.J. (2011). Practice effects predict cognitive outcome in amnestic mild cognitive impairment. The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 19(11), 932–939.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fernaeus, S.E., & Almkvist, O. (1998). Word production: dissociation of two retrieval modes of semantic memory across time. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 20(2), 137–143 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gomez, R.G., & White, D.A. (2006). Using verbal fluency to detect very mild dementia of the Alzheimer type. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 21, 771–775.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goñi, J., Arrondo, G., Sepulcre, J., Martincorena, I., de Mendizábal, N.V., Corominas-Murtra, B., … Villoslada, P. (2011). The semantic organization of the animal category: evidence from semantic verbal fluency and network theory. Cognitive Processing, 12(2), 183–196.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henry, J.D., Crawford, J.R., & Phillips, L.H. (2004). Verbal fluency performance in dementia of the alzheimer’s type: a meta-analysis. Neuropsychologia 42(9), 1212–1222.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hills, T.T., Todd, P.M., & Jones, M.N. (2015). Foraging in semantic fields: How we search through memory. Topics in Cognitive Science, 7(3), 513–534.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lehrl, S. (2005). Mehrfachwahl-Wortschatz-Intelligenztest (5., unveränd. Aufl.). Spitta.Google Scholar
Lerner, A.J., Ogrocki, P.K., & Thomas, P.J. (2009). Network graph analysis of category fluency testing. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, 22(1), 45–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Linz, N., Fors, K.L., Lindsay, H., Eckerström, M., Alexandersson, J., & Kokkinakis, D. (2019). Temporal Analysis of the Semantic Verbal Fluency Task in Persons with Subjective and Mild Cognitive Impairment. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, 103–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linz, N., Tröger, J., Alexandersson, J., & König, A. (2017). Using Neural Word Embeddings in the Analysis of the Clinical Semantic Verbal Fluency Task. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS).Google Scholar
Morris, J.C., Heyman, A., Mohs, R.C., Hughes, J.P., van Belle, G., Fillenbaum, G.D.M.E., … Clark, C. (1989). The consortium to establish a registry for Alzheimer’s disease (CERAD): I. Clinical and neuropsychological assessment of Alzheimer’s disease. Neurology, 39(9), 1159–1165.Google Scholar
Nasreddine, Z.S., Phillips, N.A., Bédirian, V., Charbonneau, S., Whitehead, V., Collin, I., … Chertkow, H. (2005). The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, MoCA: a brief screening tool for mild cognitive impairment. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 53(4), 695–699.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nutter-Upham, K.E., Saykin, A.J., Rabin, L.A., Roth, R.M., Wishart, H.A., Pare, N., et al. (2008). Verbal Fluency Performance in Amnestic MCI and Older Adults with Cognitive Complaints. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 23, 229–241.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pakhomov, S.V., Eberly, L., & Knopman, D. (2016). Characterizing Cognitive Performance in a Large Longitudinal study of Aging with Computerized Semantic Indices of Verbal Fluency. Neuropsychologia, 89, 42–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petersen, R.C. (2004). Mild cognitive impairment as a diagnostic entity. Journal of Internal Medicine, 256(3), 183–194.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Petersen, R.C., Caracciolo, B., Brayne, C., Gauthier, S., Jelic, V., & Fratiglioni, L. (2014). Mild cognitive impairment: a concept in evolution. Journal of Internal Medicine, 275(3), 214–228. https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12190 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Randolph, C., Braun, A.R., Goldberg, T.E., & Chase, T.N. (1993). Semantic fluency in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s disease: Dissociation of storage and retrieval failures. Neuropsychology, 7(1), 82–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raoux, N., Amieva, H., Goff, M.L., Auriacombe, S., Carcaillon, L., Letenneur, L., & Dartigues, J.-F. (2008). Clustering and switching processes in semantic verbal fluency in the course of Alzheimer’s disease subjects: Results from the PAQUID longitudinal study. Cortex, 44, 1188–1196.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rohrer, D., Wixted, J.T., Salmon, D.P., & Butters, N. (1995). Retrieval from semantic memory and its implications for Alzheimer’s disease. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(5), 1127–1139.Google ScholarPubMed
Shao, Z., Janse, E., Visser, K., & Meyer, A.S. (2014). What do verbal fluency tasks measure? Predictors of verbal fluency performance in older adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 772.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sheikh, J.I., & Yesavage, J.A. (1986). Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS): recent evidence and development of a shorter version. Clinical Gerontologist: The Journal of Aging and Mental Health, 5(1–2), 165–173.Google Scholar
Speer, R., Chin, J., Lin, A., Jewett, S., & Nathan, L. (2018). LuminosoInsight/wordfreq: v2.2. Zenodo [Computer Software].Google Scholar
Tröger, J., Linz, N., König, A., Robert, P., Alexandersson, J., Peter, J., & Kray, J. (2019). Exploitation vs. exploration—computational temporal and semantic analysis explains semantic verbal fluency impairment in Alzheimer’s disease. Neuropsychologia, 131, 53–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tröster, A.I., Salmon, D.P., McCullough, D., & Butters, N. (1989). A comparison of the category fluency deficits associated with Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease. Brain and Language, 37(3), 500–513.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: File

Tröger et al. supplementary material

Tröger et al. supplementary material

Download Tröger et al. supplementary material(File)
File 79.1 KB