Cognitive Reserve – investigation of its relationship with personality and its neural implementation

• Applicant: Dr. Annabell Coors
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 519357857

Cognitive Reserve describes the resistance to clinical impairments in the presence of brain pathology. It is crucial to gain a better understanding of Cognitive Reserve as this provides insights into potentially modifiable factors that allow brain pathologies to be endured without experiencing clinical impairments. In old age, the personality traits conscientiousness and neuroticism seem to be related to Cognitive Reserve, as these traits have been found to moderate the association between brain pathology and global cognition. However, further research is required to test whether this relationship also exists in younger adults and whether personality can account for the discrepancy between brain pathology and performance in all or only certain cognitive domains. Additionally, the mechanisms underlying the relationships between certain personality traits and Cognitive Reserve require further investigation. I hypothesize that the relationship between neuroticism and Cognitive Reserve may be mediated by stress perception, whereas the relationship between conscientiousness and Cognitive Reserve may be mediated by the frequency of cognitively stimulating activities. Another focus of this project is to gain a better understanding of the neural implementation of Cognitive Reserve. It has been suggested that higher Cognitive Reserve is associated with neural networks that have greater capacity and/or efficiency, or with sophisticated use of compensatory networks. Intraindividual variability in brain activation has been suggested as an important feature of brain capacity and efficiency. There are several measures of intraindividual variability in brain activation, including measures of temporal variability, signal complexity, dimensionality and frequency. However, it needs to be clarified to which degree they are related to each other and to what extent they are suitable to capture the neural mechanisms underlying Cognitive Reserve. Thus, the overall aim of this project is to gain a better understanding of Cognitive Reserve by working on two subprojects that have the following two aims:(1) To investigate whether personality represents a factor underlying Cognitive Reserve and to examine the underlying mechanisms of this relationship.(2) To investigate to which degree different measures of intraindividual variability in brain activation are interrelated, and represent neural mechanisms underlying Cognitive Reserve.I will base my analyses on questionnaire, cognition and imaging data from 394 participants of the Reference Ability Neural Network (RANN) and the Cognitive Reserve (CR) studies. These studies are ongoing, longitudinal studies that are conducted at Columbia University Irving Medical Center under the direction of Prof. Yaakov Stern.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Yaakov Stern, Ph.D.