The Potential for Literacy to Shape Lifelong Cognitive Health

Abstract

In light of population aging, an understanding of factors that promote lifelong cognitive resilience is urgent. There is considerable evidence that education early in the life span, which promotes the development of literacy skills, leads to cognitive health and longevity, but the ways in which activity engagement in later adulthood affects long-term cognitive health is not well understood. The literature on cognitive training focusing on ability and skill training has not only demonstrated the existence of plasticity into late life but also shows that improvements are very tightly tied to the abilities trained. The rush to apply ability training to promote cognitive health has produced a vibrant "brain training" industry that neglects the very limited evidence for transfer to significant functional outcomes. Recent evidence on the neural substrates of reading, language comprehension, and discourse processing, as well as on the lifelong effects of literacy engagement in special populations, hints that reading may well be a "whole-brain exercise" with the potential to promote cognitive health. Such findings suggest promise for education-based approaches to promote lifelong cognitive health, calling for (a) societal investment in science at the interface of education and health, in particular to understand the mechanisms through which literacy engagement affects mind, brain, and physical health through the life span, and (b) innovation in developing models of life span education.

Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work?

“…In other words, the students learned what they were taught, but those skills did not transfer to more basic measures of cognitive capacity. Of course, more research is needed to determine how and when education yields generalizable skills in addition to enhanced knowledge of the studied content (Stine-Morrow, Hussey, & Ng, 2015).…”

The Effects of Home-Based Cognitive Training on Verbal Working Memory and Language Comprehension in Older Adulthood

“…Literacy and effective language comprehension are crucial to maintaining cognitive abilities and learning from text through adulthood ( Manly et al, 2003 ; Stern, 2009 ; Payne et al, 2012a ; Stine-Morrow et al, 2015 ). However, normative age-related cognitive changes have a profound influence on language understanding, especially for effortful comprehension and memory processes ( Wingfield and Stine-Morrow, 2000 ; Wlotko et al, 2010 ; Payne and Stine-Morrow, 2016 ; Stine-Morrow and Payne, 2016 ).…”

Cognitive reserve attenuates age-related cognitive decline in the context of putatively accelerated brain ageing in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders

“…This was supported in our data by a very small positive correlation between age and the composite measure ( r = 0.11, p = 0.03). These measures are associated with crystallized intelligence – which is partially heritable (Plomin and Deary, 2015), but they are also uniquely predicted by intellectually enriching activities such as education and reading even after controlling for general intellectual functioning (Stine-Morrow et al ., 2015). Raw scores on both measures were standardized and summed, where patients with composite scores below the 10th percentile of the healthy control sample were classified as having below-average CR (low CR group) and those above this considered to have CR within the normal range (average CR group).…”