Route Efficiency in Spatial Navigation as an Early Indicator of Cognitive Decline

A 2026 study by Nicole Rogers on figshare analyzes spatial navigation performance in 38 participants (18 with amnestic mild cognitive impairment and 20 healthy controls). The dataset likely contains behavioral parameters from the Virtual Morris Water Navigation Task, reduced to a single 'Route Efficiency' variable via Principal Component Analysis. It correlates these metrics with neuropsychological test scores like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.

Use Cases

• Training binary classification models to detect amnestic mild cognitive impairment based on Route Efficiency and other navigation variables.
• Analyzing correlations between spatial navigation performance and cognitive assessment scores like MoCA and MoCA-MIS.
• Investigating group differences in path length, quadrant crossings, and time in target quadrant between patient and control cohorts.

Strengths

• Dataset is openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0, permitting reuse and redistribution.
• Analysis includes results from nested cross-validation, reporting an AUC of 0.78 for aMCI detection.
• Study design includes 38 participants with detailed neuropsychological assessments.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset is very small at 26.6 KB, indicating limited scope and likely summary-level data.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Data collected from 38 participants assessed with neurologic evaluation and the Virtual Morris Water Navigation Task.

Time Range

Study published in 2026; specific data collection period is not stated.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-08 05:47:17; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Geographic coverage of the participant cohort is not specified.