Verbal fluency and cognitive functioning in the CLSA

A common task used in neuropsychological assessment is verbal fluency, in which the person has one minute to produce as many words as they can conforming to a given category (e.g., animals). Usually, clinicians use the total number of items produced to make inferences about the person’s cognitive function. However, there is a wealth of information available if we look at the individual words the person produced, as well as the order in which they are produced. The current project aims to determine if these fine-grained measures of verbal fluency performance are useful to predict who might go on to have cognitive decline and/or impairment. We will also examine how factors related to a person’s health, psychological and social function, or other characteristics influence their performance on this task. These findings may provide guidance for how this simple and easily-administered task can be used to predict future cognitive function.