Effects of Time Intervals and Semantic Weight on Action Fluency Tasks in Older Adults

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in performance of action fluency tasks (AFT) based on time intervals and the semantic weight of verbs among groups of healthy young and older adults and to explore the correlation between working memory and the performance. Methods: A total of 62 Korean-speaking individuals, consisting of 31 healthy young and older adults, participated in the AFT and their performance was analyzed by the semantic weight of verbs (Heavy vs. Light) and time interval (first 30 sec vs. last 30 sec). They also participated in a working memory task. To measure working memory capacity, word span tasks (WST) - forward and backward were conducted. Results: In both groups, performance on the AFT was higher in the first 30 sec and there were more productions of heavy verbs compared to light verbs. Additionally, a positive correlation was observed in the older adults between the number of heavy verbs produced in both the first 30 sec and last 30 sec and the scores on the WST-backward. Conclusion: In this study, through a qualitative analysis based on time intervals and semantic weight, we confirmed that the first 30 sec of the AFT can be a useful source for analyzing results. Furthermore, it highlighted that the semantic weight of verbs could serve as an efficient method for predicting aging.