Research Symposium

26th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, April 1, 2026

Isaac Reyes Bardales Poster Session 2: 10:45 am - 11:45 am / Poster #105


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BIO


Isaac Reyes Bardales is a second year Cell and Molecular Neuroscience Major Born and raised in Costa Rica. With ample experience in analyzing patient behaviors/diseases and the necessary psychotropics needed to treat them through clinical and shadowing experience in psychiatric, neurological, and surgical settings, he aims to attend Medical School and become a Physician, with a particular interest in Psychiatry and Neurology.

Cognitive Skills Model for Predicting Alzheimer’s disease

Authors: Isaac Reyes Bardales, Dr. Dorota Kossowska-Kuhn
Student Major: Cell/Molecular Neuroscience
Mentor: Dr. Dorota Kossowska-Kuhn
Mentor's Department: Psychology
Mentor's College: Arts and Sciences
Co-Presenters: Kate Keegan, Lily Sheehan, and Solangel Reyes

Abstract


Dementia is an ongoing health crisis that affects many older adults around the world. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a pre-diagnosis for Dementia/Alzheimer's, with symptoms mirroring those with dementia, although milder. One indicator for MCI in older adults is spatial navigation, with the focus of this meta-data analysis being the differences in the cognitive function in spatial navigation between patients who had Mild Cognitive Behavior (MCI) and patients who were cognitively healthy (CH). Extraction of data used for this study included screening abstracts of articles focused on MCI, then full-text reviews of those articles, and finally in the most recent stage has included encoding of the data in the articles that passed the first two rounds of screening. As of writing this, our team has screened 1,824 articles at the title/abstract stage and 1,020 articles for the full text review stage. This is the largest meta-data analysis study for spatial navigation for people with MCI. This meta-data analysis aims to show the significance and relationship that cognitive skills related to spatial navigation have on diagnosing MCI.

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Keywords: Alzheimers, MCI, Neuroscience,