Adaptación de la batería de Evaluación de la Memoria Semántica en la Demencia de tipo Alzheimer (EMSDA) a la población de la ciudad de Buenos Aires

in this work some items of the evaluation battery for semantic memory deterioration in alzheimer's disease, were adapted to be used in the population of buenos aires city - república argentina (emsda -in spanish-, peraita, gonzález labra, sánchez bernardos, & galeote moreno, 2000). the original battery presents a series of tasks, elaborated with the aim of assessing semantic deterioration and/or conceptual memory in patients with alzheimer's disease. it allows specifically, assessing some features of the semantic visual and verbal knowledge of six categories concerning to living / animated beings and inanimate objects as well as the attributes that organize them. the evaluation of attributes belonging to the categories assessed by the emsda is implemented following a conceptual representation model, according to which attributes can be grouped in at least nine common conceptual components for the living things and inanimate objects categories. this conceptual representation model was constructed on the basis of an empirical approximation to the study of formation and representation of natural categories and objects representation (peraita, elosúa, & linares, 1992). the various conceptual components vary in their frequency, according to the level of generality of the categories (superordinate, basic, or subordinate), category type, age, and education level, verifying this tendency in samples of patients with dementia of the alzheimer′s type (dat). the purpose of this paper is to present the items adjustment of some tasks of the emsda to the population of buenos aires city. the battery was administered to 30 healthy elderly between 61 and 88 years and 12 years average of education. the participants were carefully selected to be included in the sample. to rule out cognitive deterioration we did not include participants whose performance in the mini mental state examination and the wechsler memory scale revised were one standard deviation bellow the expected scoring for