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And they remarked repeatedly in their paper that they were
quite surprised that they found no relation between self-reported health and cognitive
status; between personality and cognitive status; nor between the active lifestyle,
self-report and cognition and by active lifestyle they were referring to people’s
hobbies and physical fitness activities. They did see, however, a relationship between
participation in what they called novel tasks and working memory. By novel tasks they were
asking people to talk about things they learned such as a new language, did they learn
bridge, if they were acquiring sort of complex mental skills later in life. Now, they
honestly called an alternative interpretation which I think doesn’t come up in many
other studies that apply to a lot of them that I read and that is that high-ability adults
end up leading intellectually active lives when they’re young and as they age. Whether
you can call this a predictor, it isn’t facilitating good cognition, it’s what
they’ve always had and so they are likely to maintain a higher level of cognition as
they age relative to other people. |