Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it

 I probably need to start doing Ken-Ken puzzles for the numeracy portion. Your doctor better cure your aphasia so you can read as needed.

This really tells me nothing. Nothing on what reading and amounts to do or types of math problems to do. Useless!

Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it

Eric A. Hanushek https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7090-7535 , Lavinia Kinne https://orcid.org/0009-0007-8787-8770, Frauke Witthöft, and Ludger Woessmann https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6912-2319Authors Info & Affiliations

Science Advances

5 Mar 2025

Vol 11, Issue 10

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• Abstract
• INTRODUCTION
• RESULTS
• DISCUSSION
• MATERIALS AND METHODS
• Acknowledgments
• Supplementary Materials
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Abstract

Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier. If accurate, such age-driven skill losses pose a major threat to the human capital of societies with rapidly aging populations. We estimate actual age-skill profiles from individual changes in literacy and numeracy skills at different ages. We use the unique German longitudinal component of the Programme of the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC-L) that retested a large representative sample of adults after 3.5 years. Our empirical approach separates age from cohort effects and corrects for measurement error from reversion to the mean. Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy and more strongly in numeracy. Second, skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties. Women have larger skill losses at older age, particularly in numeracy.

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INTRODUCTION

The commonly accepted conclusion that cognitive skills decline with age starting rather early in adult life (1) has increasingly important potential economic implications. Cognitive skills measured by literacy and numeracy are closely related to individual earnings (2–4) and national growth rates (5, 6), implying that the steady and marked changes in the age composition of societies (7) might directly affect the economic well-being of nations. However, this assumed skill pattern has largely come from cross-sectional data that necessarily incorporate not only aging patterns but also cohort differences in skills. If the negative age pattern is simply due to conflating age and cohort effects, the economic concerns are considerably lessened. Recently developed individual longitudinal skill tests for a representative population of adults allow us to provide evidence on actual changes in skills with age and on their relationship with adult skill usage.

We study the inevitability of age-driven skill decline using exceptional longitudinal data for the German adult population. Administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) tested literacy and numeracy skills that are relevant for participation in social life and work, and surveyed economic and social conditions for random samples of the population aged 16 to 65 in 39 countries (8). Germany, unique among all participating countries, created a panel of participants from the PIAAC sample who were re-surveyed and retested 3.5 years after the original survey.

We use the panel dimension of the data to estimate credible average age-skill profiles for the adult population. Observing actual changes in adult skills over the full age spectrum allows us to break the confounding of age and cohort patterns that has been ubiquitous in general cross-sectional analyses of adult skills. We estimate the average annualized marginal changes in skills for each age and concatenate them across individuals of different ages to derive full age-skill profiles. However, the panel data introduce new methodological problems that must be addressed before the analysis of age-skill patterns.

Creating reliable age-skill patterns based on individual aging requires addressing the bias from measurement errors that inevitably accompany testing of skills over time. Observations of test scores include a combination of true scores and measurement errors, leading to systematic errors when looking at individual changes with age. Intuitively, low observed test scores are more likely to include negative errors. When we observe another assessment for an initially low-scoring individual, the measurement error is unlikely to be as negative as the first time, implying that the change in true test scores is biased upward for low-scoring individuals. For initially high-scoring individuals, the opposite will be true. This reversion to the mean will bias the overall age-skill relationship when skills vary by age. Thus, we correct the observed change in test scores throughout for reversion to the mean (9) to obtain error-adjusted age-skill patterns.

We find that average (error-corrected) skills increase substantially into the forties for both literacy and numeracy. Subsequently, average skills decline slightly in literacy and strongly in numeracy. The averages, however, mask important heterogeneity.

With the appropriately adjusted age-skill profiles, we can further investigate the role of skill usage. Previous analyses have considered whether individual background or occupations influence the evolution of age-skill patterns. These investigations of heterogeneity in age patterns are generally motivated by assumed differences in skill usage across groups, but data on skill usage have not typically been available. Because the background data from the PIAAC survey provide information on the detailed nature and frequency of participants’ skill usage at work and at home, we are able to explore the demographic aging patterns in greater depth.

Individuals with above-average skill usage at work and home on average never face a skill decline (at least until the limit of our data at age 65). Consistent with the assumptions of prior studies, usage interacts closely with a variety of background characteristics. Thus, both literacy and numeracy skills keep increasing for white-collar and tertiary-educated workers in the second half of their working life if they have above-median skill usage, but not if skill usage is below the median. Skill evolution also varies by gender: Women show steeper skill decline at older ages, especially in numeracy.

The primary contribution of our analysis to the literature on cognitive aging is the development of rich age-skill profiles for literacy and numeracy skills, skills which have been shown to have economic payoffs in the labor market, using longitudinal variation in a large representative sample. The data allow us to go beyond averages to consider important dimensions of heterogeneity and to describe the connection of profile differences with individual behavior and background. The studies closest to our analysis use different large-scale representative surveys with literacy and numeracy skills (1, 10), but these do not track actual skill changes of individuals over time. A parallel set of psychological and neuroscience studies offer related estimates of age patterns and their sources, albeit for different dimensions of skills and for nonrepresentative samples (11–16), but evidence on their relationship to the economic outcomes that motivate our work is lacking.

RESULTS

Average age-skill profiles

The starting point for our analysis comes from the cross-sectional picture of how cognitive skills vary with age. Figure 1Opens in image viewer depicts adult literacy and numeracy skills by age in the PIAAC test for representative population samples of all participating OECD countries [see also (8, 17)]. In the cross section, average literacy and numeracy scores start declining in the late twenties to early thirties. This pattern is duplicated qualitatively for Germany, our analysis country, where average literacy scores steadily fall from age 20, while numeracy scores rise slightly before beginning to decline in the late thirties (fig. S1).

Fig. 1. Cross-sectional age-skill profiles (OECD countries).

Cross-sectional association between age and skills in PIAAC (2012). Dots: Average skills by age. Line: Quadratic fit (estimated over 21 to 65 age range). Skills measured in SD units. Sample: 25 OECD countries with continuous age data; full population, ages 16 to 65, weighted by sampling weights (N = 147,667). Data source: PIAAC.

However, it is difficult to interpret these cross-sectional patterns because they conflate age and cohort effects. Individuals across different ages also come from different cohorts and have thus experienced different histories of skill determinants, implying that these charts fail to describe the true patterns of the age-skill relationship over time for any individual. As a result, they also cannot reliably be used to understand the factors that feed into skill changes by age without introducing strong assumptions about the nature of cohort and individual time patterns.

The changes in observed numeracy and literacy skills for individuals over time show a very different pattern than suggested by the cross-sectional data. Figure 2BOpens in image viewer depicts the annualized marginal changes in scores with age for individuals at each age for the full German population sample (3263 observations). The analysis corrects for reversion to the mean, and it includes a quadratic fit and 95% confidence intervals. The quadratic prediction indicates increases in skills for individuals up to age 45 in literacy and up to age 40 in numeracy. Skill changes turn negative beyond these ages, with notably stronger declines for numeracy than for literacy. In both subjects, the marginal change in skills declines steadily with age. Initially, this decline is close to linear but ultimately gets flatter.

Crosswords and Computers: Mental Acuity Tasks Beat Socializing in Dodging Dementia

Well this was known way back in May 2019, DID YOUR INCOMPETENT DOCTOR MISS THIS?

I'll have to start up Sudoku and Ken-ken again. I'll still do my extensive social activities, I'm not taking chances.

Regular crosswords and number puzzles linked to sharper brain in later life May 2019 

The latest here:

Crosswords and Computers: Mental Acuity Tasks Beat Socializing in Dodging Dementia

Summary: A recent study indicates that engaging in mental acuity tasks can potentially decrease dementia risk more than social activities or creative hobbies.

By analyzing data from 10,318 Australian adults aged 70 and above, researchers found that those who regularly participated in literacy activities and mind-challenging tasks were 9-11 percent less likely to develop dementia. Creative hobbies and more passive activities, like reading, only reduced dementia risk by 7 percent.

The study underlines the importance of active mental stimulation in reducing dementia risk in older adults.

Key Facts:

1. The study utilized data from over 10,000 Australian adults aged 70 and older.
2. Those engaging regularly in mental acuity tasks were 9-11% less likely to develop dementia.
3. Social activities and creative hobbies had a lesser impact on reducing dementia risk.

Source: Monash University

Computer use, crosswords and games like chess are more strongly associated with older people avoiding dementia than knitting, painting or socializing, a Monash University study has found.

Published in JAMA Network Open, the findings—some of the most robust on this topic to date—may help older individuals and aged care professionals plan more targeted approaches to reducing dementia risk.

In 2022, 55 million people globally lived with dementia, with 10 million new cases each year. Credit: Neuroscience News

Researchers drew data from 10,318 Australians aged 70 and older participating in the ASPREE project and the ALSOP (ASPREE Longitudinal Study of Older Persons) sub-study.

They found that participants who routinely engaged in adult literacy and mental acuity tasks such as education classes, keeping journals, and doing crosswords were 9-11 percent less likely to develop dementia than their peers.

Creative hobbies like crafting, knitting and painting, and more passive activities like reading reduced the risk by 7 percent. In contrast, the size of someone’s social network and the frequency of external outings to the cinema or restaurant were not associated with dementia risk reduction.

The results remained statistically significant even when adjusted for earlier education level, and socioeconomic status. No significant variations were found between men and women.

In 2022, 55 million people globally lived with dementia, with 10 million new cases each year.

Senior author Associate Professor Joanne Ryan, from the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, said identifying strategies to prevent or delay dementia was a huge global priority.

“We had a unique opportunity to close a gap in knowledge by investigating a broad range of lifestyle enrichment activities that older adults often undertake, and assess which of those were most strongly aligned with avoiding dementia,” Associate Professor Ryan said.

“I think what our results tell us is that active manipulation of previously stored knowledge may play a greater role in dementia risk reduction than more passive recreational activities. Keeping the mind active and challenged may be particularly important.”

The leisure activities assessed encompassed:

• adult literacy activities such as adult education classes, using computers, keeping a journal
• mental acuity tasks like completing quizzes and crosswords, playing cards/chess
• creative hobbies like woodworking, knitting or painting
• more passive activities like keeping up with the news, reading or listening to music
• social network activities like meeting and interacting with friends
• planned excursions such as going to a restaurant, museum or the cinema.

Associate Professor Ryan said the results did not rule out that those naturally drawn to the types of leisure activities linked to cognitive health also had specific personality traits that were otherwise beneficial, or they may generally have had better health behaviors.

“While engaging in literacy and mental acuity activities may not be a magic pill to avoid dementia, if that was your goal and you had to choose, our research certainly suggests these are the activities most likely to support prolonged good cognitive health,” she said.

Associate Professor Ryan said social connection may also still be quite important to cognitive health and mental well-being, even though it did not show a clear link with dementia risk in the study.

“The participants were cognitively healthy, and were likely already leading socially active lives, such that the cognitive benefits of strong social networks may be less obvious in this group compared to the general public,” she said.

About this cognition and dementia research news

Author: Joanne Ryan
Source: Monash University
Contact: Joanne Ryan – Monash University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Original Research: Open access.
“Lifestyle Enrichment in Later Life and Its Association With Dementia Risk” by Joanne Ryan et al. JAMA Network Open

 

How ‘superagers’ stay sharp in their later years

I will need to work on my memory, with 19,000+ blog posts there are lots that I don't recall specifics on any more. Eg., why I started taking certain supplements. A friend's husband had a TBI and I didn't recall specifics about what I wrote about so it was all new to me again.

Started working on Ken-ken puzzles along with Sudoku again.

I wonder if this 107 year old was a super-ager or just a high functioning drunk?

Man Dies Aged 107, Thanked Red Wine For Long Life - 3 liters a day, no water

The latest here:

How ‘superagers’ stay sharp in their later years

A new study shows how strenuous mental and physical exercise keeps your brain firing on all cylinders

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Sun 30 Apr 2017 04.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 19.52 EDT

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Photograph: Getty Images

When it comes to retirement, experts recommend that everyone do some hard thinking. By this, they mean you should plan your finances responsibly, consider carefully where to live, and decide what colour beach chair to sit in all day as you sip strawberry daiquiris in the sun. But there’s another reason to think hard about these details: hard thinking by itself – a strenuous mental workout – is good for your ageing brain.
My collaborators and I at Massachusetts General hospital and Northeastern University in Boston study people over 65 who have incredible memories for their age, on a par with healthy 25-year-olds. Scientists call them “superagers” (a term coined by neurologist Marsel Mesulam at Northwestern University in Chicago). While nobody knows exactly why some people are superagers, we believe that one common factor is that they engage in demanding mental exercise. They continually challenge themselves to learn new things outside of their comfort zone.
Beginning in middle age, research shows, many people take steps to avoid unpleasantness: they quit their irritating jobs; take relaxing holidays instead of vigorous ones; they pursue happiness. Scientists call this phenomenon the “positivity effect”.
Nobody wants a life filled with stress, so it’s reasonable to indulge the positivity effect and divest yourself of negative things. In fact, stress that continues for a long time, a condition known as chronic stress, is toxic to your brain – it literally eats away at critical brain regions.
Not all stress is bad, however. Research suggests that you need some amount of stress in your life if you want to stay mentally sharp – in particular, the momentary stress that comes with hard work. Your nervous system evolved so that occasional bouts of stress, where you tax your body and brain for a short time, is necessary to keep your brain healthy as you age.
To understand why this is the case, consider how your memory works. Whenever you remember something, like where you left your car keys, you aren’t retrieving a memory wholesale from some distinct crevice in your brain; instead, you construct memories in the moment, out of bits and pieces gathered from around your brain. This construction process is launched by an ensemble of brain regions that, according to our research, are thicker and better connected in superagers. Perhaps you’ve heard of some of these regions, which include the hippocampus, the anterior insula, the midcingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex, among others.
The same “superager ensemble” of brain regions also assembles your thoughts, emotions, decisions, dreams, sights, sounds, smells, and everything else you perceive, using the same construction process that makes your memories. Anytime you feel happy or afraid, for example, your brain constructs those emotions out of bits and pieces of your past experience in similar situations, led by your brain’s superager ensemble.
In addition, the superager ensemble performs the vital task of regulating your organs, hormones and immune system. These brain regions are responsible for predicting your body’s energy needs in advance, to keep you alive and healthy. If you’re getting the idea that they are hugely important, you’re right: they are major hubs that coordinate communication throughout your brain. They show up in thousands of neuroscience studies on diverse topics. I’m calling them the superager ensemble only as a convenient shorthand.

French sculptor Louise Bourgeois in her studio in New York in 1995 – she was in her early 80s. Photograph: Porter Gifford/Corbis via Getty Images

All in all, when the key regions of your superager ensemble are thick and well connected, your brain can regulate your body and construct your experiences faster and more efficiently. But it’s not always easy to keep these regions in good shape, because they also create the stressful feelings that you have when exerting yourself. Thinking hard can make you feel unpleasant in the moment, just as strenuous physical exercise can make you ache for a time. These unpleasant feelings invite you to stop working hard. Based on research in my lab, however, if you want to realise the brain benefits of superageing, you must push past the momentary discomfort. In many cases, the unpleasant feeling is a false alarm, and you actually do have the mental or physical resources to continue exerting yourself.
What enables superagers to persevere in the face of unpleasantness? That’s an open question, but scientists have found that if they electrically stimulate one of the regions of the superager ensemble – the midcingulate cortex – subjects report a feeling of motivation to overcome difficult challenges. The psychologist and author Angela Duckworth calls this feeling “grit”.
In the past, some researchers have described grit as the ability to regulate your emotions by thinking rationally. Modern neuroscience, however, has established that the human brain has no dedicated areas for thinking versus feeling. Our research suggests that grit is not so much a grand battle between cognition and emotion; it’s more the ability to use your unpleasant feelings as fuel rather than as a reason to apply the brakes. Superagers, and other people who regularly cultivate grit, treat their unpleasant feeling as a signal to keep going.
So, what can you do to increase your chances of being a superager? While there are no guarantees, here are some tips.
First, engage in strenuous mental activity on a regular basis, enough to make you feel unpleasant in the moment. Pick a topic that has always interested you, whether it’s chemistry or gardening or sports statistics, and dive into it until your brain hurts. Take classes that you find challenging, or work on a project that’s difficult. Learn to play a musical instrument, or study a foreign language. If you fail at your task, don’t fret, just try something else. The key is to push past the discomfort that comes with learning a new subject or skill.
The head of my daughter’s karate school, Grandmaster Joe Esposito, has a saying about pushing past discomfort, when he speaks to his nervous students before their black belt test: “Make your butterflies fly in formation.” I suspect that superagers keep their butterflies exceptionally well trained.

JRR Tolkien was in his 60s when Lord of the Rings was first published.

Second, if you aren’t exercising regularly, begin doing so if you can. Studies show that vigorous physical effort, again past the point of unpleasantness, may have similar effects on your brain as hard mental effort. The mechanisms are not yet known, but demanding exercise appears to improve the thickness and connectivity of the same brain regions. For example, in one study, people who exercised regularly in their 60s were more likely to be mentally fit in their 90s. (Of course, check with your GP before beginning any new programme of physical exercise, especially if you’re near or past retirement age. Superageing is much less satisfying when accompanied by pulled muscles or broken bones.)
Third, eat healthy food and get enough sleep. Several studies have shown that a Mediterranean diet, rich in vegetables, fruits, fish and healthy fats like olive oil, is associated with better memory, less cognitive decline, and less brain atrophy in general. Sufficient sleep is known to be important for a healthy memory, and it even clears out certain “wastes” from your brain, known as beta-amyloid plaques, that are linked to dementia.
I’ll also offer some non-advice. You may hear that you can exercise your brain by playing sudoku and visiting “brain game” websites. These relatively mild activities are not likely to increase your odds of becoming a superager, because the level of difficulty is too low. You have to work hard enough to feel the strain of effort.(I'm sure Platinum Blonde in Sudoku is difficult enough.)

Superageing is an area of ongoing research, with important, unanswered questions. We cannot say definitively, for example, if superagers are born or made. We also don’t know if some people have a head start on superageing because their superager ensemble starts out thicker or better connected than average. What we do know is that the regions of the superager ensemble tend to be thinner in people who have suffered adversity, particularly as a child or adolescent.
We also know that these regions are thicker for children and adolescents who exercise regularly. Exercise improves memory and school performance in children and also has an effect on brain structure, although more research is necessary to determine the exact range of effects.
Also, damage to the superager ensemble is associated with a long list of serious disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia, chronic pain, chronic stress, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease.
In other words, it’s never too early to start attending to your superager ensemble. Just as you should save money for retirement beginning at a young age, you can also start preserving your memory early. (Scientists call this your “cognitive reserve”.) Don’t wait until you’re old to start saving – your future health may depend on it.
Currently, my colleagues and I are exploring whether people who regularly push past momentary discomfort are better protected against dementia and depression. These disorders are associated with beta-amyloid plaques, the wastes that accumulate in your brain as you age, especially as you head past 65. We suspect that people who seek and tolerate challenging tasks are helping to protect their memory, even if they have these plaques.

Judi Dench, now in her 80s, is ‘still wowing audiences in a field that requires lots of memorisation’. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

History is full of people who flourished late in life, such as Julia Child, who published her first cookbook when she was nearly 50, and Teiichi Igarashi, who climbed Mount Fuji at 99. Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings in his 60s. Artists such as Mary Delany, who created 1,700 meticulously crafted paper flowers, and Louise Bourgeois, the sculptor of the giant metal spider Maman, did their most skilled work in their 70s and 80s. I can’t say whether these impressive individuals are superagers, because we haven’t tested their memory in the lab, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Personally, I would love to test Judi Dench, who at 82 is still wowing audiences in a field that requires lots of memorisation. (On the other hand, a certain 70-year-old president of the United States, who seems to change his mind every 10 minutes, is almost certainly not a superager.)
So, if you want to stay mentally healthy into old age, don’t just retire: rewire. Help to build up your brain circuitry through regular sessions of vigorous effort, whether physical or mental. Keep up the hard work, push past momentary discomfort, and have a happy “rewirement”.
• Lisa Feldman Barrett (@LFeldmanBarrett) is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University and the author of How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. To order a copy for £16.14 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846