What Drives Task Performance in Fluency Tasks in People With HIV?

Area of Science:

• Neuropsychology
• Linguistics
• Infectious Diseases

Background:

• Fluency tasks assess language and executive functions.
• Little is known about specific fluency task impairments in people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
• Understanding the underlying cognitive drivers is crucial for targeted interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare fluency task performance (animal, letter, unconstrained) in people with HIV against a normative sample.
• To identify differences in word production across fluency tasks.
• To determine the role of specific language and executive functions in HIV-related fluency performance.

Main Methods:

• Analyzed fluency data (animal, letter, unconstrained) from 50 Spanish-speaking individuals with HIV.
• Measured task switches, mean cluster size, and word properties (frequency, age of acquisition, length).
• Employed chi-square tests, linear mixed-effects models, random forests, and conditional inference trees, with cross-validation.

Main Results:

• People with HIV did not show greater impairment across fluency tasks compared to normative data.
• Fewer words were produced in letter fluency vs. animal/unconstrained, and in animal fluency vs. unconstrained.
• Number of switches was the strongest predictor; word frequency, age of acquisition, and cluster size were task-specific predictors.

Conclusions:

• People with HIV utilize language (phonological output lexicon) and executive functions (updating, monitoring) in fluency tasks.
• Findings align with existing literature on cognitive function in HIV.
• Future research should explore correlations with other cognitive tests and diverse fluency tasks.