Executive functioning moderates the decline of retrieval fluency in time

Abstract

citeas). AcknowledgmentsWe thank Lucia Slezáková and Zuzana Mokrá for help with data collection and data preparation.

Measuring semantic memory using associative and dissociative retrieval tasks

“…Beyond that, stimuli in fluency tasks (being it different categories or letters) suffer from stimulus-inherent confounds (e.g. number, frequency or taxonomic and thematic clarity of candidate words) which influence retrieval demands [ 32 , 89 , 100 ]. Another line of evidence suggests that common fluency measures of automatic (clustering) and controlled (switching) retrieval both capture executive processing to some degree, and the picture gets even blurrier when considering time spent performing the task [ 28 , 32 , 85 , 101 ].…”

“…dissociates) to serially presented word stimuli. Previous research has shown that retrieving semantically dissociated words exerts substantially more cognitive effort and processing time than the FA task, which has been attributed to additional control demands pertaining to inhibition and response monitoring [29][30][31][32][33]. The putative engagement of the inhibitory mechanisms in the dissociative retrieval stems from the inherent need to suppress the automatic (but task-inappropriate) semantic activations and response candidates evoked by the stimulus words [10,11,34,35].…”

“…The weights were quantified using LogDice similarity scores, which consider the raw collocations of two associations (counted each time two associations co-occurred within the sequence of four associations to a given stimulus) and their respective occurrences within the association norms (see [ 72 ]). Note that LogDice was selected to quantify associative weights in networks as this metric is predictive of response latencies in various semantic tasks [ 31 , 32 , 73 ]. Then, four variables describing the associative topology of the networks were calculated: (i) modularity (Louvain algorithm [ 74 ]) quantifying the partitioning of word associations into distinct semantic clusters; (ii) average shortest path length [ 75 ] expressing the weighted distances among all associations in the network; (iii) global clustering coefficient indicating the tendency of associations linked to any other association in the network to be also connected; and (iv) global network efficiency [ 76 , 77 ], indicating the degree to which a network affords efficient propagation of information among its nodes.…”

Fluency generating emotion words correlates with verbal measures but not emotion regulation, alexithymia, or depressive symptoms.

“…The 60 s time constraint may have diminished participants' performance or inhibited deep semantic processing of the emotion words (Maule & Edland, 1997;Winkielman et al, 2018). A systematic manipulation of the task duration (e.g., 1 min vs. 5 min, as has been called for in verbal fluency tasks; Michalko et al, 2022) could clarify how time pressure impacts performance and how well scores track other variables of interest. That said, we would conceptualize allowing participants to fully list all known emotion words without a time limit as a separate construct (potentially "emotion vocabulary;" see L. Beck et al, 2012).…”

“…These tasks are thought to assess specific executive functioning abilities, including word retrieval and processing speed, and are widely used in neuropsychological testing to evaluate cognitive functioning (Henry & Crawford, 2004; Henry et al, 2004; Jurado & Rosselli, 2007; Metternich et al, 2014; Shao et al, 2014). In the current study, we adapted these verbal fluency measures to assess how many emotion words people could generate in 60 s. By altering one aspect of the task (i.e., asking participants to generate emotion words) while retaining other aspects (e.g., a short time limit; Badre & Wagner, 2002; Michalko et al, 2022), we maintain consistency with prior verbal fluency measures. Conceptually, maintaining a short time limit also allows us to measure the psychological process that occurs when people must name their emotions in daily life with relative speed, such as when in conversations with others.…”