Category size effects in semantic and letter fluency in Alzheimer’s patients

Diaz, Michael; Sailor, Kevin M.; Cheung, Doris; Kuslansky, Gail

doi:10.1016/s0093-934x(03)00307-9

Cited by 51 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Such an account might partly explain the impact of age and c o r t e x x x x ( 2 0 0 8 ) 1 -9 dementia on fluency in these subcategories. Diaz et al (2004) reported a similar relationship between subcategory size and fluency for three subcategories (animals, fruits and vegetables) in AD patients. The current study confirms and extends this finding by showing that this phenomenon does not extend to nonliving subcategories.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 67%

The impact of dementia, age and sex on category fluency: Greater deficits in women with Alzheimer's disease

Moreno-Martínez¹,

Laws

Schulz

2008

Cortex

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AgingCategory specific Semantics Sex differences APOE a b s t r a c t A category specific effect in naming tasks has been reported in patients with Alzheimer's dementia. Nonetheless, naming tasks are frequently affected by methodological problems, e.g. ceiling effects for controls and ''nuisance variables'' that may confound results.Semantic fluency tasks could help to address some of these methodological difficulties, because they are not prone to producing ceiling effects and are less influenced by nuisance variables. One hundred and thirty-three participants (61 patients with probable AD; and 72 controls: 36 young and 36 elderly) were evaluated with semantic fluency tasks in 14 semantic categories. Category fluency was affected both by dementia and by age: while in nonliving-thing categories there were differences among the three groups, in living thing categories larger lexical categories produced bigger differences among groups. Sex differences in fluency emerged, but these were moderated both by age and by pathology. In particular, fluency was smaller in female than male Alzheimer patients for almost every subcategory.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 67%

The impact of dementia, age and sex on category fluency: Greater deficits in women with Alzheimer's disease

Moreno-Martínez¹,

Laws

Schulz

2008

Cortex

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“…In consequence, a large category could spuriously appear as a better screening tool than a smaller one just because of its size. In fact, it has been shown that patients with DAT seem to have a greater fluency deficit in larger categories [43]. Although a detailed consideration of the category size factor is outside the scope of this paper, a few comments seem to be in order.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Almost Always <b><i>Animals</i></b>? Ranking Fluency Tasks for the Detection of Dementia Based on Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Quality ROC Analyses

Moreno-Martínez

Ruiz

Montoro³

2016

Dement Geriatr Cogn Disord

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Background/Aims: Category fluency tasks have been widely used to assess cognitive functioning in both clinical and experimental environments as an index of cognitive and psycholinguistic dysfunctions in dementia. Typically, a reduced group of semantic categories has been selected for neuropsychological assessment (e.g., animals, fruits or vegetables), although empirical support for the prevalence of one category among others is absent in the literature. Methods: We provide an empirical evaluation of the ability of 14 category fluency tasks to discriminate between subjects with dementia of the Alzheimer type and healthy elderly participants. As a novelty, we used both receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and quality ROC calibrated analyses to characterize the interplay of sensitivity and specificity of every category fluency task performance as a screening tool. The use of calibrated measures provided us with a useful tool for comparing the diagnostic ability of the different categories, as well as making rankings of categories based on the quality indices of efficiency, sensitivity, and specificity. Results: The habitually used category of animals is far from being the most efficient one in terms of its diagnostic power to evaluate dementia. Conclusion: Our study might guide the selection of suitable category fluency tasks according to the diagnostic purposes in dementia.

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“…One of the commonest category fluency tests is the one minute animal naming task, wherein a subject is asked to name as many animals as possible in the allotted time. Animal naming is well developed for use in children and adults, routinely applied, and is sensitive to early cognitive changes in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's disease (AD); it has been adapted as part part of the Neuropsychology Battery of the Uniform Data Set designed by the National Institute of Health, see, e.g., Caramelli et al (2007), Gomez and White (2006), Kramer et al (2006), Canning et al (2004), Morris et al (2006), Sauzeon et al (2004), Tombaugh et al (1999), Diaz et al (2003) and Weiner et al (2008).…”

Section: Category Fluency Tests (Cft)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Random local temporal structure of category fluency responses

et al. 2011

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The Category Fluency Test (CFT) provides a sensitive measurement of cognitive capabilities in humans related to retrieval from semantic memory. In particular, it is widely used to assess progress of cognitive impairment in patients with dementia. Previous research shows that, in the first approximation, the intensity of tested individuals' responses within a standard 60-s test period decays exponentially with time, with faster decay rates for more cognitively impaired patients. Such decay rate can then be viewed as a global (macro) diagnostic parameter of each test. In the present paper we focus on the statistical properties of the properly de-trended time intervals between consecutive responses (inter-call times) in the Category Fluency Test. In a sense, those properties reflect the local (micro) structure of the response generation process. We find that a good approximation for the distribution of the de-trended inter-call times is provided by the Weibull Distribution, a probability distribution that appears naturally in this context as a distribution of a minimum of independent random quantities and is the standard tool in industrial reliability theory. This insight leads us to a new interpretation of the concept of "navigating a semantic space" via patient responses.

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Category size effects in semantic and letter fluency in Alzheimer’s patients

Cited by 51 publications

References 22 publications

The impact of dementia, age and sex on category fluency: Greater deficits in women with Alzheimer's disease

The impact of dementia, age and sex on category fluency: Greater deficits in women with Alzheimer's disease

Why Almost Always <b><i>Animals</i></b>? Ranking Fluency Tasks for the Detection of Dementia Based on Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Quality ROC Analyses

Random local temporal structure of category fluency responses

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