Sex and performance level effects on brain activation during a verbal fluency task: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

The Relationship Between Executive Functions and Flow in Learning

“…Structural and functional imaging studies have shown that both the PVF task (Gauthier et al, 2009) and the flow state induced experimentally by mathematic calculation (Ulrich et al, 2014) activates left IFG. It seems that neural network activated in flow during mathematic calculation and in highly efficient VF performance partly corresponds.…”

“…Previous studies found gender differences in respect to VF and verbal abilities (Gauthier, Duyme, Zanca, & Capron, 2009;Halpern, 1994) with women scoring higher than men, and also found gender differences in cerebral activation associated with covert VF task (Gauthier et al, 2009), emphasizing the need to consider sex in studies of VF. Also, there are age and education effects on phonemic VF (Pendleton, Heaton, Lehman, & Hulihan, 1982;Zimmermann, Parente, Joanette, & Fonseca, 2014), although some studies did not reveal age effect on VF in adult population (e.g., Cauthen, 1978;Cohen, 2000).…”

Functional connectivity in resting state as a phonemic fluency ability measure

“…Several investigations have studied the neural basis of verbal fluency (Gauthier, Duyme, Zanca, & Capron, 2009;Heim, Eickhoff, & Amunts, 2008;Weiss et al, 2004;Weiss, 2003). In a meta-analysis, Wagner et al, (2014) included twenty-eight individual studies with a total of 499 healthy volunteers to separately study the brain areas involved during the performance of phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks.…”

“…Although right inferior frontal activation has been related with semantic tasks (sentence comprehension) (Price, 2010), it is also relevant because has been associated with attentional switching and response inhibition (Hampshire, Chamberlain, Monti, Duncan, & Owen, 2010). The left insula was also strongly involved in phonemic processing and during the performance of the verbal fluency task (Brown et al, 2009;Gauthier et al, 2009;Price, 2010;Saur et al, 2008). Some studies have also related the insula to vocal production (Ackermann & Riecker, 2004;Riecker, Ackermann, Wildgruber, Dogil, & Grodd, 2000).…”

Right-hemispheric cortical contributions to language ability in healthy adults

“…Broca's area, located in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and specified as BA 44 and 45, is often co-activated during reading paradigms (Lindenberg & Scheef, 2007;Vigneau et al, 2006;Bookheimer, 2002;Friederici, 2002). Word fluency is typically characterized in the brain by activation of Broca's area (Heim, Eickhoff, & Amunts, 2009), often accompanied by activation in adjacent prefrontal regions and also activation in the temporal and parietal cortices (Friedman et al, 1998;Fu et al, 2002;Gauthier, Duyme, Zanca, & Capron, 2009). Further, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the anterior insular cortex (AIC) are frequently engaged across a wide distribution of cognitive tasks, including language (Fu et al, 2002;Medford and Critchley, 2010).…”