Moving in Semantic Space in Prodromal and Very Early Alzheimer's Disease: An Item-Level Characterization of the Semantic Fluency Task
Loading...
Access rights
openAccess
URL
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
This publication is imported from Aalto University research portal.
View publication in the Research portal (opens in new window)
View/Open full text file from the Research portal (opens in new window)
Other link related to publication (opens in new window)
View publication in the Research portal (opens in new window)
View/Open full text file from the Research portal (opens in new window)
Other link related to publication (opens in new window)
Date
2022-02-21
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
12
1-12
1-12
Series
Frontiers in Psychology, Volume 13
Abstract
The semantic fluency task is a widely used clinical tool in the diagnostic process of Alzheimer's disease. The task requires efficient mapping of the semantic space to produce as many items as possible within a semantic category. We examined whether healthy volunteers (n = 42) and patients with early Alzheimer's disease (24 diagnosed with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment and 18 with early Alzheimer's dementia) take advantage of and travel in the semantic space differently. With focus on the animal fluency task, we sought to emulate the detailed structure of the multidimensional semantic space by utilizing word2vec-method from the natural language processing domain. To render the resulting multidimensional semantic space visually comprehensible, we applied a dimensionality reduction algorithm (t-SNE), which enabled a straightforward division of the semantic space into sub-categories. Moving in semantic space was quantified with the number of items created, sub-categories visited, and switches and returns to these sub-categories. Multinomial logistic regression models were used to predict the diagnostic group with these independent variables. We found that returning to a sub-category provided additional information, besides the number of words produced in the task, to differentiate patients with Alzheimer's dementia from both amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment patients and healthy controls. The results suggest that the frequency of returning to a sub-category may serve as an additional aid for clinicians in diagnosing early Alzheimer's disease. Moreover, our results imply that the combination of word2vec and subsequent t-SNE-visualization may offer a valuable tool for examining the semantic space and its sub-categories.Description
Funding Information: We thank Kirsten I. Taylor, Ph.D., who was the principal investigator of the Ambizione study and who let us use the data set for our analyses. The content of the present manuscript has originally appeared online in a master's thesis (Saranp??, 2020). We thank Mr. Jari Lipsanen from Helsinki University for his invaluable role as an advisory for the master's thesis and for technical aid with the analyses performed. Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2022 Saranpää, Kivisaari, Salmelin and Krumm.
Keywords
Alzheimer's disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, semantic fluency, semantic memory, t-SNE, verbal fluency
Other note
Citation
Saranpää, A M, Kivisaari, S L, Salmelin, R & Krumm, S 2022, ' Moving in Semantic Space in Prodromal and Very Early Alzheimer's Disease : An Item-Level Characterization of the Semantic Fluency Task ', Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, 777656, pp. 1-12 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.777656