Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Leticia Yanina Vivas | Email: lvivas@mdp.edu.ar
Leticia Yanina Vivas1°, Axel Fernández Zaionz1°
1° IPSIBAT (CONICET/UNMDP)
Primary Progressive Aphasia constitute a group of dementia syndromes characterized by prominent earlier symptoms in language, isolated from other cognitive domains. It can be classified into three variants: logopenic, semantic and non-fluent (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011). The former has a profile with working memory deficits as a main feature but can also show phonological, syntactic and semantic deficits. The second has mainly semantic deficits but can also show slight syntactic deficits. The last one, shows motor, syntactic and phonological errors, with normal semantic and working memory. In the current work we aimed to compare the linguistic profiles of PPA patients with the semantic and logopenic variants in order to analyze if the results of the Minilinguistic State Examination correspond to the theoretical profile. More precisely, we tried to identify statistically significant dissociations between errors in the different domains of the test. We collected a sample of 4 svPPA and 9 lvPPA. We carried out dissociation analyses according to Crawford et al (2003) proposal comparing the performance of the patients in the different domains. We observed a substantial impairment in working memory for all lvPPA and in semantic memory for svPPA. Additionally we observed impaired performance in other language domains according to the theoretical profile and significantly lower than the main domain (working memory or semantic memory). However, some svPPA patients presented also a substantial deficit in working memory. To conclude, these data suggest that substantial semantic memory impairment is a defining feature of svPPA, but working memory deficits can be observed both in sv and lvPPA.