The Role of Education and Intellectual Activity on Cognition

Although educational attainment has been consistently related to cognition in adulthood, the mechanisms are still unclear. Early education, and other social learning experiences, may provide the skills, knowledge, and interest to pursue intellectual challenges across the life course. Therefore, cognition in adulthood might reflect continued engagement with cognitively complex environments. Using baseline data from the Baltimore Experience Corps Trial, multiple mediation models were applied to examine the combined and unique contributions of intellectual, social, physical, creative, and passive lifestyle activities on the relationship between education and cognition. Separate models were tested for each cognitive outcome (i.e., reading ability, processing speed, memory). With the exception of memory tasks, findings suggest that education-cognition relations are partially explained by frequent participation in intellectual activities. The association between education and cognition was not completely eliminated, however, suggesting that other factors may drive these associations. 1. The Role of Education and Intellectual Activity on Cognition Cognitive enrichment early in life may account for some of the variation in cognitive ability in adulthood. Consistently, higher educational attainment is associated with greater levels of cognitive performance [1–5], as well as with a reduced risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease [6–9]. Although the exact mechanisms are unclear, one possibility is that educational experiences provide the foundation for continued intellectual stimulation across the life course, resulting in improved cognitive functioning in late adulthood. Prior research findings contribute to the plausibility of this assumption. First, educational attainment is often associated with greater participation in various lifestyle activities [10, 11], especially those that are cognitively demanding [12–14]. Second, the beneficial effects of maintaining an engaged lifestyle have been demonstrated across several studies, even when activities are introduced later in life [15–19]. Education may cultivate the knowledge, skills, and ability necessary for continued participation in intellectually demanding activities (e.g., reading, taking courses) well into later adulthood. According to the engagement hypothesis, individuals who continuously place significant demands on their intellectual resources (i.e., through multiple and complex decisions, ill-defined problem solving) may maintain or even enhance cognitive potential [3, 20, 21]. Therefore, compared to