Marginal neurofunctional changes in high-performing older adults in a verbal fluency task

Marsolais, Yannick; Methqal, Ikram; Joanette, Yves

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2014.10.010

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Behavioral results (Table 2b) revealed a significant aging effect for fluency rate according to age, in agreement with other results reported in the literature (Clark et al 2009; Crossley et al 1997) but in disagreement with some others that found no aging effect (Aine et al 2006; Bolla et al 1990; Bolla et al 1998; Grady 2008) or only a marginal effect (Marsolais et al 2015). Moreover, behavioral results revealed significant differences between groups in terms of latencies for PPTT, with the older adults being slower than the younger adults.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Functional MRI evidence for the decline of word retrieval and generation during normal aging

Baciu

Boudiaf

Cousin

et al. 2015

AGE

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This fMRI study aimed to explore the effect of normal aging on word retrieval and generation. The question addressed is whether lexical production decline is determined by a direct mechanism, which concerns the language operations or is rather indirectly induced by a decline of executive functions. Indeed, the main hypothesis was that normal aging does not induce loss of lexical knowledge, but there is only a general slowdown in retrieval mechanisms involved in lexical processing, due to possible decline of the executive functions. We used three tasks (verbal fluency, object naming, and semantic categorization). Two groups of participants were tested (Young, Y and Aged, A), without cognitive and psychiatric impairment and showing similar levels of vocabulary. Neuropsychological testing revealed that older participants had lower executive function scores, longer processing speeds, and tended to have lower verbal fluency scores. Additionally, older participants showed higher scores for verbal automatisms and overlearned information. In terms of behavioral data, older participants performed as accurate as younger adults, but they were significantly slower for the semantic categorization and were less fluent for verbal fluency task. Functional MRI analyses suggested that older adults did not simply activate fewer brain regions involved in word production, but they actually showed an atypical pattern of activation. Significant correlations between the BOLD (Blood Oxygen Level Dependent) signal of aging-related (A > Y) regions and cognitive scores suggested that this atypical pattern of the activation may reveal several compensatory mechanisms (a) to overcome the slowdown in retrieval, due to the decline of executive functions and processing speed and (b) to inhibit verbal automatic processes. The BOLD signal measured in some other aging-dependent regions did not correlate with the behavioral and neuropsychological scores, and the overactivation of these uncorrelated regions would simply reveal dedifferentiation that occurs with aging. Altogether, our results suggest that normal aging is associated with a more difficult access to lexico-semantic operations and representations by a slowdown in executive functions, without any conceptual loss.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Functional MRI evidence for the decline of word retrieval and generation during normal aging

Baciu

Boudiaf

Cousin

et al. 2015

AGE

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“…Increased activation in the precentral areas is possibly attributable to increased speech motor planning or articulatory movements given the higher number of responses generated by the healthy compared to the dementia group. Likewise, prior research in healthy adults has indicated that verbal fluency tasks yield significant activation in these regions (Paulesu et al, 1997;Pihlajamäki et al, 2000;Meinzer et al, 2009Meinzer et al, , 2012Birn et al, 2010;Nagels et al, 2011;Marsolais et al, 2015;Li et al, 2017). As the verb fluency task requires participants to retrieve lexical items that are specifically pertinent to actions that people do, visual imagery of these verbs during search or retrieval may have led to the activation of precuneus and calcarine areas.…”

Section: Brain Activation Differences Between Cognitively Healthy Oldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The entire neuroimaging session was comprised of five functional runs and one anatomical run, but only the runs related to the anatomical scans and the verb fluency task are described in this study (see Paek et al, 2019 for details about other parts of the session). It is well-established that verbal fluency tasks are sensitive to dementia (e.g., Östberg et al, 2005), and previous studies have shown that fMRI of word production is feasible and can yield reliable results (e.g., Birn et al, 2004;Marsolais et al, 2015). All participants previously experienced an MRI scan and performed in-scanner naming tasks as part of the larger project; thus, they were familiar with the task and situation.…”

Section: Fmri Stimuli and Paradigmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural Correlates of Verb Fluency Performance in Cognitively Healthy Older Adults and Individuals With Dementia: A Pilot fMRI Study

Paek

Murray

Newman

2020

Front. Aging Neurosci.

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Currently there are ∼6 million Americans who are affected by dementia. Verbal fluency tasks have been commonly and frequently utilized to document the disease progression in many forms of dementia. Verb fluency has been found to display substantial potential to detect and monitor the cognitive declines of individuals with dementia who have fronto-striatal involvement. The neural substrates underlying verb fluency task performance, however, have remained unclear so far, especially in individuals with dementia. Therefore, in the current study, brain activation patterns of seven individuals with dementia and nine healthy older adults were investigated using functional MRI. The participants performed in the scanner an overt, subject-paced verb fluency task, representative of fluency tasks used in clinical settings. The brain activation patterns during the verb fluency task were compared between the two groups, and a correlational analysis was conducted to determine the neural correlates of verb fluency performance. The results suggest that compared to healthy older adults, individuals with dementia demonstrated poorer verb fluency performance and showed higher activation in specific neural regions, such as the bilateral frontal lobe. In addition, the correlational analysis revealed that poorer verb fluency performance lead to increased activation in certain cortical and subcortical areas, including left hippocampus and right supramarginal gyrus. The current findings are consistent with previous neurophysiological findings related to semantic (noun) fluency performance in older adults and individuals with dementia and add to the empirical evidence that supports the role of the frontal lobe and hippocampus in verb retrieval and search. Declines in verb fluency performance cannot only be used as a cognitive marker, but also represent neuropathological changes due to the neurodegenerative disease.

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“…Moreover, we included a very large sample of 191 patients to optimize the statistical sensitivity and brain coverage of our analyses. Because age and education level have been shown to influence fluency performance (Tombaugh et al, 1999;Katzev et al, 2013;Marsolais et al, 2015), we used the continuous fluency scores corrected for these factors as behavioral inputs in the analyses. We further analyzed the correlation between the score at each of the fluency task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partly segregated cortico-subcortical pathways support phonologic and semantic verbal fluency: A lesion study

et al. 2016

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Abstract-Verbal fluency refers to the ability to generate as many words as possible in a limited time interval, without repetition and according to either a phonologic (each word begins with a given letter) or a semantic rule (each word belongs to a given semantic category). While current literature suggests the involvement of left fronto-temporal structures in fluency tasks, whether the same or distinct brain areas are necessary for each type of fluency remains unclear. We tested the hypothesis for an involvement of partly segregated cortico-subcortical structures between phonologic and semantic fluency by examining with a voxel-based lesion symptom mapping approach the effects of brain lesions on fluency scores corrected for age and education level in a group of 191 unselected braindamaged patients with a first left or right hemispheric lesion. There was a positive correlation between the scores to the two types of fluency, suggesting that common mechanisms underlie the word generation independent of the production rule. The lesion-symptom mapping revealed that lesions to left basal ganglia impaired both types of fluency and that left superior temporal, supramarginal and rolandic operculum lesions selectively impaired phonologic fluency and left middle temporal lesions impaired semantic fluency. Our results corroborate current neurocognitive models of word retrieval and production, and refine the role of cortical-subcortical interaction in lexical search by highlighting the common executive role of basal ganglia in both types of verbal fluency and the preferential involvement of the ventral and dorsal language pathway in semantic and phonologic fluency, respectively. Ó

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Marginal neurofunctional changes in high-performing older adults in a verbal fluency task

Cited by 12 publications

References 60 publications

Functional MRI evidence for the decline of word retrieval and generation during normal aging

Functional MRI evidence for the decline of word retrieval and generation during normal aging

Neural Correlates of Verb Fluency Performance in Cognitively Healthy Older Adults and Individuals With Dementia: A Pilot fMRI Study

Partly segregated cortico-subcortical pathways support phonologic and semantic verbal fluency: A lesion study

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