Verbal fluency is the ability to generate words belonging to a specific semantic category (eg, animals, fruits), or beginning with a specific letter (eg, F, A, and S) within a limited amount, of time. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have demonstrated an age-related decline on

this task.44,45 Huff42 suggested that the aging effect, in verbal fluency, but not in verbal naming, may result from age-related deficits to retrieve words from lexical-semantic Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical memory. He added that the word-retrieval process mediated by automatic mechanisms may not decline with age, but an age-related deficit, may become evident whenever a task requires strategic search processing. Visuospatial abilities A wide variety of cognitive tasks, such as those assessing visual discrimination, visual recognition, visual attention, spatial memory, and spatial planning, are Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Library mw subsumed under the category of “visuospatial skills.” Hslinger and Benton46 found that elderly individuals performed significantly worse than younger ones on tests of facial discrimination Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and judgment, of line orientation, and Danziger and Salthouse47 reported more errors on a task of visual perceptual decision in elderly as compared to young individuals. Ogden48 suggested that the age-related decline in spatial abilities

may be primarily related to the specific visual, perceptual, and memory demands of the task, and stressed Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the importance Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of assessing visuospatial functions in the elderly using tasks not influenced by sensory deficits or perceptual-motor slowing. Executive functions Executive

function refers to those processes by which an individual optimizes performance, such as the ability to respond flexibly and appropriately, the efficient scheduling of behavior and attentional resources, the suppression of inappropriate responding, the use of strategics to enhance memory functions, and the formulation of new plans of action.49 Measurements of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical executive abilities were reported to predict, functional autonomy and functional living skills in older adults.50,51 Several the cognitive mechanisms, such as planning, concept formation, problem solving, and set shifting, are usually considered to belong to the executive function domain. Set shifting is the ability to initiate a new concept, and suppress a previously employed concept, that is no longer appropriate to the task. This ability is usually assessed with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), which measures the ability to develop and apply new concepts and subsequently shift sets. Haaiand et al52 assessed the WCST in healthy individuals ranging from 64 to 87 years of age, and found that, only those over 80 years of age had deficits on this task. Cronin-Golomb53 demonstrated mild age-related deficits in concept formation and set-shifting abilities, but stressed that these deficits could be also related to memory load and task complexity.