The impact of sustained engagement on cognitive function in older adults: the Synapse Project

Abstract

In the research reported here, we tested the hypothesis that sustained engagement in learning new skills that activated working memory, episodic memory, and reasoning over a period of 3 months would enhance cognitive function in older adults. In three conditions with high cognitive demands, participants learned to quilt, learned digital photography, or engaged in both activities for an average of 16.51 hr a week for 3 months. Results at posttest indicated that episodic memory was enhanced in these productive-engagement conditions relative to receptive-engagement conditions, in which participants either engaged in nonintellectual activities with a social group or performed low-demand cognitive tasks with no social contact. The findings suggest that sustained engagement in cognitively demanding, novel activities enhances memory function in older adulthood, but, somewhat surprisingly, we found limited cognitive benefits of sustained engagement in social activities.

Keywords: aging cognition; cognitive aging; cognitive reserve; cognitive training; engagement; episodic memory; intervention; working memory.

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1

Normalized mean score for episodic memory as a function of condition and time. Error bars represent ±1 SE.

Fig. 2

Mean standardized gain score as a function of condition for each cognitive construct. The standardized scores from the posttest were subtracted from standardized scores from the pretest, yielding the mean standardized gain scores for each cognitive construct. Error bars represent ±1 SE. Asterisks represent significant differences between conditions (*p = .05; **p = .01); daggers represent marginally significant differences between conditions (p = .10).

Fig. 3

Standardized gain score for episodic memory for each participant. Results are shown separately for each condition. The dashed horizontal lines represent the standard error of measurement (the upper line is +1 SEM, and the lower line is −1 SEM). Vertical lines above the dashed horizontal line represent a reliable positive change in performance, and vertical lines below the dashed line indicate a reliable negative change in performance.