The Puppy Escape Narrative: Validation of an Openly Available Recall Task for MCI Detection

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Clinical Diagnostics

Background:

• Narrative recall tests are crucial for identifying cognitive impairment.
• Existing tools like the Craft Story 21 (CS) face proprietary restrictions, limiting accessibility.
• There is a need for freely available, validated narrative recall instruments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To validate the freely available Puppy Escape (PE) test for detecting cognitive impairment.
• To assess PE's convergent and criterion validity against the CS.
• To evaluate PE's ability to discriminate between mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and cognitively normal individuals.

Main Methods:

• 346 participants (153 cognitively normal, 106 subjective cognitive impairment, 87 MCI) completed both PE and CS.
• Convergent validity, criterion validity, MCI-vs-control discrimination, and incremental validity were analyzed.
• Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and regression analyses were employed.

Main Results:

• PE demonstrated strong convergence with CS (r=.43-.47) and equivalence on most neuropsychological measures.
• PE successfully discriminated MCI from controls (d=1.03), with performance comparable to CS.
• PE added significant variance beyond CS (ΔR²=+.054, p<.001), and its short form (PE-18) retained discriminative ability.

Conclusions:

• Puppy Escape (PE) is a valid and reliable tool for assessing cognitive function, comparable to established measures.
• PE offers complementary diagnostic information and is freely accessible for research and clinical applications.
• The PE-18 short form provides an efficient option for cognitive screening.