The present study aimed at validating the Memory Associative Test of the district of Seine-Saint-Denis (TMA)-93, a new test of episodic memory. The TMA-93 was proposed to mostly less educated and multicultural elderly population composed of 376 healthy controls (HC) and 94 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The construct validity was checked by studying correlations with a widely used memory test (the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test [FCSRT]) in the subsample of literate patients. Results showed that (i) all the TMA-93 scores of the patients with AD were lower than those of the HC, (ii) the TMA-93 total score identified patients with AD with a high sensitivity (88%) and very high specificity (97%), and (iii) the TMA-93 total score was strongly correlated with both free recall and total recall scores of the FCSRT. Taken together, results showed that the TMA-93 is a reliable tool to assess episodic memory in a multicultural, less educated, or illiterate population, with good construct validity for AD diagnostic accuracy.
Keywords: associative memory; cognitive assessment; cross-cultural neuropsychology; dementia; literacy; memory test.