Abstract

Background: in recent years, network psychometrics has emerged from the application of network theory to the analysis of psychological instruments, which derives from the network approach to psychopathology. One of the contributions of the latter is the understanding of comorbidity and contagion between syndromes as the action of shared symptoms between them: the bridge symptoms. Objective: to illustrate the identification of bridge symptoms by analyzing the orientation and memory dimensions of the Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination III test in a sample of older adults. Identifying symptoms that act as key factors connecting different cognitive areas could lead to the design of more targeted and personalized interventions to slow down their progression. Method: the R language is used to estimate the network as an ising model. Results: in a sample of 1,164 older adults, we identified five bridge nodes between both dimensions according to the strength of the bridge: two belong to orientation (year and month) and three to memory (military government, Copiapo 3, and current president). Conclusions: the progression of cognitive deterioration from the memory area to the orientation area would occur mainly from problems in recovering general spatial and temporal information in the medium and long term to difficulties in locating oneself in global temporal terms (year and month).