The interactive support of cognitive reserve and semantic knowledge in proper name retrieval

Abstract

Cognitive reserve (CR) refers to acquired experience that modulates resistance to physiological aging or brain damage. A relatively neglected issue is whether or not CR affects cognitive abilities equally. One relevant component of CR seems to be the richness of connections in semantic knowledge. We examined, in N=66 healthy older adults, the potential influence of CR and semantic knowledge on the ability to retrieve proper names and common nouns. These two name categories have different semantic organizations, whereby proper names are characterized by a weaker semantic link to the information they refer to. Controlling for age, CR and semantic knowledge were linearly and positively associated with common noun retrieval. On the other hand, CR assisted proper name retrieval in older adults with a weaker semantic profile, while semantic knowledge assisted proper name retrieval in older adults with lower CR. This study contributes to define the cognitive underpinnings of CR.

Aging-related effects on the controlled retrieval of semantic information.

“…In the literature, education level is often used as a proxy for cognitive reserve, namely the knowledge and experience an individual acquires throughout the life span (Stern, 2009). Cognitive reserve can be a protective factor against age-related or pathological cerebral deterioration and is strongly correlated with an individual’s semantic knowledge (Darby et al, 2017; Montemurro et al, 2020). For this reason, it is not surprising that this factor affected the semantic processing performance of the participants in the present study (with a better general performance for participants with a higher education level).…”