Education, lifelong mental activity, and emotional skills can support cognitive abilities and influence how the brain changes with age. The study’s findings were published in the journal Brain Sciences.
Mental abilities can change with age, but these changes are not the same for everyone. Some older adults maintain strong performance across a wide range of mental tasks.
Two projects conducted by the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, investigated the reasons behind these differences. They focused on “cognitive reserve”—the mental resources built up through education, work, and mentally demanding activities.
One of the projects examined language and word retrieval. Study co-author Elisabetta Pisanu focused on the first 10 seconds of a task that required participants to rapidly generate words.
“Our results show that older adults with higher cognitive reserve achieve linguistic performance comparable to that of younger people,” Pisanu said. “In our experiments, we focused on what happens during the first ten seconds of a verbal fluency task, when people are searching for the right words to express their thoughts.”
The initial 10 seconds proved sufficient to demonstrate how aging and cognitive reserve affect the speed of word retrieval. Cognitive reserve can help older adults maintain strong language skills and word-finding abilities.
Emotional content also played a role in language performance; older adults found it easier to recall positive words than negative ones.
“Older adults more easily recall words associated with positive emotions than those associated with negative emotions.” “These results indicate that, in addition to the protective role of cognitive reserve, the emotional tone of words also influences linguistic abilities,” said Pisanu.
The second project focused on investigating working memory—the ability to briefly hold and use information.
Study co-author Stefania Lucia compared the roles of cognitive reserve and emotional intelligence. “We wanted to understand whether cognitive reserve and emotional intelligence play different roles depending on whether emotions are relevant or irrelevant to a task requiring working memory,” Lucia said.
The working memory analysis included 45 healthy adults aged 65 to 84. Participants viewed happy, angry, and neutral faces and assessed whether the facial expression or age category matched a face shown previously.
They performed a simpler version using the immediately preceding face image and a more complex version using the face image shown two steps back. In the more complex task, participants showed lower accuracy and slower response times.
Higher cognitive reserve was associated with greater accuracy. This link was independent of task complexity, facial expression, or whether participants were evaluating emotions or age.
“Our results show that cognitive reserve improves task accuracy regardless of experimental conditions. This suggests it plays a fundamental role in maintaining the ability to retain and process information needed to perform a task,” Lucia said.
Emotions mattered most when participants had to evaluate facial expressions. In this condition, happy faces were associated with faster reactions and greater accuracy than angry ones.
“When a task involves emotional content, older adults perform better; they appear to become more efficient,” Lucia said.
Emotional intelligence was defined as individuals’ subjective assessment of their ability to recognize, understand, manage, and use emotions. It was not associated with higher overall accuracy, but it was linked to reaction times to happy faces.
“This affects how people process information and formulate a response, ultimately determining their performance. For example, people with higher emotional intelligence take longer to react to emotional stimuli, likely because they devote more attention and cognitive resources to processing them,” said Lucia. “This indicates not greater complexity, but rather a deeper and more thorough processing of emotional information.”
The article takes a more cautious approach regarding the reasons for the variation in reaction times. The study did not measure the mental processes underlying the responses, so the notion of deeper emotional processing remains, at most, a possibility.
The sample size was relatively small, and the analysis included only older adults. Happy and angry faces may also differ in emotional intensity or the degree to which they capture attention, factors that could have influenced the results.
Emotional intelligence was assessed based on individuals’ self-evaluations of their abilities. While the findings show a link to performance outcomes, they do not prove that building cognitive reserve or emotional intelligence prevents cognitive decline.
Professor Raffaella Rumiati, a neuroscientist at SISSA and principal investigator for both projects, placed this work within the context of broader Italian research on aging.
“Both studies were conducted as part of the ‘Age-It: Ageing Well in an Ageing Society’ program—an ambitious national research initiative that laid the groundwork for a research and information infrastructure dedicated to studying aging from various perspectives, including socioeconomic, biomedical, and technological aspects,” Rumiati said. “Italy, along with Japan, has one of the longest life expectancies in the world. While this is a remarkable achievement, it also presents us with new challenges.”
As the elderly population grows, an increasing number of people will require medical assistance and long-term care. Preserving cognitive function for as long as possible can improve quality of life and reduce the burden on healthcare and social welfare systems.
Rumiati stated that this work could improve aging research methods and help identify factors associated with superior cognitive abilities in later life.
“Our research can make a significant contribution in two areas: improving the methodological tools used to study cognitive aging and identifying factors that help protect cognitive function as people age,” Rumiati said. “Our research shows that an intellectually stimulating life helps preserve a wide range of cognitive functions, from language to working memory. It also highlights the important role of emotions, which, as our studies demonstrate, contribute significantly to the efficiency of cognitive processes.”
Overall, the findings indicate that cognitive reserve and emotional abilities are associated with better performance on certain mental tasks in older adults.
Taken together, the results suggest that a lifetime of mental experience and emotional abilities may be linked to various aspects of cognitive function in later life.
Further research is needed to understand whether these factors truly influence the development of cognitive abilities as we age.
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