ABSTRACT

Purpose: There have been studies investigating the pattern of brain activation on cognitive tasks. However, at present, no study has examined verbal fluency tasks using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) for the Korean population. The purpose of this study was to investigate age related relative changes of oxygenated hemoglobin during verbal fluency tasks using fNIR, a portable and non-invasive imaging technique. Methods: In this study, nine young and 6 healthy older Korean individuals performed two verbal fluency tasks, a phonological task (producing words with a letter /d/) and a semantic task (producing animal category). Results: The results showed that younger individuals performed better in the two verbal tasks and mean Hbt values, during fNIR measures, were relatively higher for younger individuals in both tasks. However, the Hbt values in the right hemisphere for older individuals were much higher than younger individuals, especially in the more difficult phonological task. Conclusions: The results suggest that older individuals need support from the right hemisphere to successfully complete a more difficult cognitive task, unlike younger individuals. The results also suggest that brain activation during verbal fluency tasks are age related.