A review of the main tasks used to assess the semantic impairment in Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Semantic memory (SM) impairment is one of the main symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD). SM is concerned with the representation of words, concepts and word knowledge. AD is an unpleasant experiment of «nature» that could help us to elaborate models to explain semantic memory organization. In this paper, we review the main tasks used to assess the SM system, and the results of the evaluation of AD patients. We also present data about categoryspecific effects, which consist on a total or partial impairment of a domain, for example, living beings (or animate) domain, but not of the other one, for example, artifacts domain -or vice versa-. These effects have important implications in the study of the semantic organization.