Schooling is critical for cognitive health throughout life

August 10, 2020

Science Daily/Association for Psychological Science

New research suggests that education provides little to no protection against the onset of cognitive declines later in life. It can, however, boost the cognitive skills people develop earlier in life, pushing back the point at which age-related dementia begins to impact a person's ability to care for themselves.

Investing time in education in childhood and early adulthood expands career opportunities and provides progressively higher salaries. It also conveys certain benefits to health and longevity.

A new analysis published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest (PSPI), however, reveals that even though a more extensive formal education forestalls the more obvious signs of age-related cognitive deficits, it does not lessen the rate of aging-related cognitive declines. Instead, people who have gone further in school attain, on average, a higher level of cognitive function in early and middle adult adulthood, so the initial effects of cognitive aging are initially less obvious and the most severe impairments manifest later than they otherwise would have.

"The total amount of formal education that people receive is related to their average levels of cognitive functioning throughout adulthood," said Elliot M. Tucker-Drob, a researcher with the University of Texas, Austin, and coauthor on the paper. "However, it is not appreciably related to their rates of aging-related cognitive declines."

This conclusion refutes the long-standing hypothesis that formal education in childhood through early adulthood meaningfully protects against cognitive aging. Instead, the authors conclude that individuals who have gone further in school tend to decline from a higher peak level of cognitive function. They therefore can experience a longer period of cognitive impairment before dropping below what the authors refer to as a "functional threshold," the point where cognitive decline becomes so obvious that it interferes with daily activities.

"Individuals vary in their rates of aging-related cognitive declines, but these individual differences are not appreciably related to educational attainment," notes lead author Martin Lövdén, formerly with the Karolinska Institute and Stockholm University in Sweden and now with the University of Gothenburg.

For their study, the researchers examined data from dozens of prior meta-analyses and cohort studies conducted over the past two decades. The new PSPI report evaluates the conclusions from these past studies to better understand how educational attainment affects both the levels of and changes in cognitive function in aging and dementia.

Although some uncertainties remain after their analysis, the authors note, a broader picture of how education relates to cognitive aging is emerging quite clearly. Throughout adulthood, cognitive function in individuals with more years of schooling is, on average, higher than cognitive function in those with fewer years of schooling.

This review highlights the importance of formal education for cognitive development over the course of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. According to the researchers, childhood education has important implications for the well-being of individuals and societies not just during the years of employment, but throughout life, including old age. "This message may be particularly relevant as governments decide if, when, and how to reopen schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such decisions could have consequences for many decades to come," said Tucker-Drob.

The authors conclude that improving the conditions that shape development during the first decades of life carries great potential for improving cognitive ability in early adulthood and for reducing public-health burdens related to cognitive aging and dementia.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200810145450.htm

Meditate regularly for an improved attention span in old age

Extensive study finds that regular meditation sessions can have a long-lasting effect on a person's attention span and other cognitive abilities

March 28, 2018

Science Daily/Springer

Regular and intensive meditation sessions over the course of a lifetime could help a person remain attentive and focused well into old age. This is according to the most extensive longitudinal study to date examining a group of meditation practitioners. The research evaluates the benefits that people gained after three months of full-time meditation training and whether these benefits are maintained seven years later.

This study follows up on previous work by the same group of researchers at the University of California, Davis in 2011, which assessed the cognitive abilities of 30 people who regularly meditated before and after they went on a three-month-long retreat at the Shambhala Mountain meditation center in the US. At the center, they meditated daily using techniques designed to foster calm sustained attention on a chosen object and to generate aspirations such as compassion, loving-kindness, emphatic joy and equanimity among participants, for others and themselves. During this time, another group of 30 people who regularly meditated were also monitored. Other than traveling to the meditation center for a week-long assessment period, they carried on with their lives as normal. After the first group's initial retreat was over, the second group received similar intensive training at the Shambhala Mountain Center.

As part of this study, follow-up assessments were conducted six months, eighteen months and seven years after completion of the retreats. During the last appraisal, participants were asked to estimate how much time over the course of seven years they had spent meditating outside of formal retreat settings, such as through daily or non-intensive practice. The forty participants who had remained in the study all reported some form of continued meditation practice: 85 per cent attended at least one meditation retreat, and they practiced amounts on average that were comparable to an hour a day for seven years.

The participants again completed assessments designed to measure their reaction time and ability to pay attention to a task. Although these did not improve, the cognitive gains accrued after the 2011 training and assessment were partially maintained many years later. This was especially true for older participants who practiced a lot of meditation over the seven years. Compared to those who practiced less, they maintained cognitive gains and did not show typical patterns of age-related decline in sustained attention.

"This study is the first to offer evidence that intensive and continued meditation practice is associated with enduring improvements in sustained attention and response inhibition, with the potential to alter longitudinal trajectories of cognitive change across a person's life," says Zanesco.

He is aware that participants' lifestyle or personality might have contributed to the observations. Zanesco therefore calls for further research into meditation as an intervention to improve brain functioning among older people.

He says the current findings also provide a sobering appraisal of whether short-term or non-intensive mindfulness interventions are helpful to improve sustained attention in a lasting manner. Participants practiced far more meditation than is feasible for shorter-term programs that might aim to help with cognitive aging, and despite practicing that much meditation, participants did not generally improve over years; these benefits instead plateaued. Zanesco believes this has broad implications for meditation and mindfulness-based approaches to cognitive training and raises important questions regarding how much meditation can, in fact, influence human cognition and the workings of the brain.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180328103708.htm