Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Department of Neurology and Cognitive Science Department, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Neuropsychology. 2012 May;26(3):400-405. doi: 10.1037/a0027989.
Many disorders are characterized by impoverished ideational fluency. Tests of letter word, category word, and design fluency likely invoke different cognitive processes, but they might depend on overlapping cortical circuits. Despite differences in the tasks used to assess it, we hypothesized that ideational fluency represents a dissociable dimension of human cognition.
Altogether, 317 healthy adults and 280 adults with medical or psychiatric illnesses completed a cognitive test battery that included three measures of ideational fluency. Principal component analyses assessed the factor loadings of these fluency measures along with 10 other cognitive test scores. A series of hierarchical multiple regressions determined the relative contribution of the other fluency measures to the fluency variable of interest after accounting for demographic factors and other cognitive abilities.
In both participant groups all three measures of word and design fluency loaded on a single factor. An ideational fluency composite score was also normally distributed among healthy adults. After accounting for demographic characteristics, intelligence, processing speed, memory, and executive functioning, adding terms for letter- and category-cued word fluency improved multiple regression models predicting design fluency and vice versa.
Despite differences among them, the three fluency measures emerged as clearly distinct from other cognitive abilities. Alternate fluency measures also accounted for significant incremental variability in both word and design fluency, even after accounting for other cognitive abilities. Thus, word and design fluency appear to involve a distinct and dissociable, material-independent dimension of cognitive processing, namely ideational fluency.
许多障碍的特点是意念流畅性不足。字母词、类别词和设计流畅性测试可能会引发不同的认知过程，但它们可能依赖于重叠的皮质回路。尽管评估它的任务存在差异，但我们假设意念流畅性代表人类认知的一个可分离维度。
共有 317 名健康成年人和 280 名患有医学或精神疾病的成年人完成了一个认知测试组合，其中包括三种意念流畅性测量。主成分分析评估了这些流畅性测量的因子负荷，以及其他 10 项认知测试分数。一系列层次多重回归确定了在考虑人口统计学因素和其他认知能力后，其他流畅性测量对感兴趣的流畅性变量的相对贡献。
在两个参与者组中，所有三种单词和设计流畅性测量都加载在一个单一的因子上。意念流畅性综合得分在健康成年人中也呈正态分布。在考虑人口统计学特征、智力、加工速度、记忆和执行功能后，添加字母和类别提示词流畅性的术语可以改善设计流畅性的多元回归模型，反之亦然。
尽管存在差异，但这三种流畅性测量方法显然与其他认知能力不同。替代流畅性测量也解释了单词和设计流畅性的显著增量变化，即使在考虑了其他认知能力之后也是如此。因此，单词和设计流畅性似乎涉及到认知处理的一个独特和可分离的、与材料无关的维度，即意念流畅性。
