Abstract Background The social domain impairments associated with Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration have been linked to basic neurocognitive processes such as visual emotion identification through facial expressions. Method In this study, we explore the recognition of seven basic emotions presented in the Mini‐SEA test in a sample of 84 Colombian individuals with dementia (32 with Alzheimer’s Disease and 30 with Frontotemporal Dementia) and compare it with 22 healthy participants from the RedLat study. Result The results of the behavioral performance show a lower performance in people with dementia compared to healthy subjects, however, no significant differences are reported between the patient group (AD and FTD). Conclusion These findings may be associated with the clinical heterogeneity of the evaluated subjects. References: Couto, B., Manes, F., Montañés, P., Matallana, D., Reyes, P., Velasquez, M., … Ibáñez, A. (2013). Structural neuroimaging of social cognition in progressive non‐fluent aphasia and behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00467 Hot, P., Klein‐Koerkamp, Y., Borg, C., Richard‐Mornas, A., Zsoldos, I., Paignon Adeline, A., … Baciu, M. (2013). Fear recognition impairment in early‐stage Alzheimer’s disease: When focusing on the eyes region improves performance. Brain and Cognition, 82(1), 25‐34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2013.02.001