Unsworth Nash, Spillers Gregory J, Brewer Gene A
Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602–3013, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2011 Mar;64(3):447-66. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2010.505292. Epub 2010 Sep 13.
Verbal fluency tasks have long been used to assess and estimate group and individual differences in executive functioning in both cognitive and neuropsychological research domains. Despite their ubiquity, however, the specific component processes important for success in these tasks have remained elusive. The current work sought to reveal these various components and their respective roles in determining performance in fluency tasks using latent variable analysis. Two types of verbal fluency (semantic and letter) were compared along with several cognitive constructs of interest (working memory capacity, inhibition, vocabulary size, and processing speed) in order to determine which constructs are necessary for performance in these tasks. The results are discussed within the context of a two-stage cyclical search process in which participants first search for higher order categories and then search for specific items within these categories.
在认知和神经心理学研究领域，言语流畅性任务长期以来一直被用于评估和估计执行功能方面的群体和个体差异。然而，尽管这些任务很常见，但对于在这些任务中取得成功至关重要的具体组成过程仍然难以捉摸。当前的研究试图通过潜在变量分析来揭示这些不同的组成部分及其在决定流畅性任务表现中的各自作用。比较了两种类型的言语流畅性（语义和字母）以及几个感兴趣的认知结构（工作记忆容量、抑制、词汇量和处理速度），以确定哪些结构对于这些任务的表现是必要的。研究结果将在一个两阶段循环搜索过程的背景下进行讨论，在这个过程中，参与者首先搜索高阶类别，然后在这些类别中搜索特定项目。
