Cognitive Reserve – investigation of its relationship with personality and its neural implementation
Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics
Final Report Abstract
Life expectancy has increased in recent decades. As age is a major risk factor for dementia, the prevalence of dementia will continue to rise in the coming years and become an even greater societal challenge. Cognitive impairments are not inherent to aging per se, but age is a proxy for the accumulated lifetime stressors that affect cognitive function, such as changes in the brain. However, not all individuals are equally susceptible to brain changes, and some individuals can withstand severe brain pathology without experiencing cognitive complaints. These individuals are said to have higher cognitive resilience. One of the underlying mechanisms of cognitive resilience is cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve is a concept that attempts to explain interindividual differences in the susceptibility of cognitive performance to age-related and pathological brain changes. Individuals with higher cognitive reserve can withstand greater brain changes before showing cognitive impairments. In my first project, I investigated whether certain personality traits are related to higher cognitive reserve, as I assumed that individuals pursue different leisure activities depending on their personality traits. We found that high openness is related to higher cognitive reserve. This suggests that interventions aimed at enhancing openness may help to maintain cognitive performance in old age. I also wanted to better understand why even individuals with initially high cognitive reserve may not be able to withstand strong age-related changes in brain structure forever. Our findings suggest that in older individuals with more severe age-related and pathological brain changes, cognitive reserve can either no longer be implemented in the brain’s neural networks or needs to be implemented in a different way. My last, currently ongoing project deals with the question of whether higher variability in brain activation represents a neural mechanism of cognitive reserve.
Publications
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Brain reserve affects the expression of cognitive reserve networks. Human Brain Mapping, 45(5).
Coors, Annabell; Lee, Seonjoo; Gazes, Yunglin; Gacheru, Margaret; Habeck, Christian & Stern, Yaakov
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Personality traits and cognitive reserve—High openness benefits cognition in the presence of age-related brain changes. Neurobiology of Aging, 137, 38-46.
Coors, Annabell; Lee, Seonjoo; Habeck, Christian & Stern, Yaakov
