| Poster | Poster Session 08 Program Schedule
02/16/2024
01:45 pm - 03:00 pm
Room: Shubert Complex (Posters 1-60)
Poster Session 08: Cognition | Cognitive Reserve Variables
Final Abstract #15
Cognitive Reserve and Personality Traits
Annabell Coors, Cognitive Neuroscience Division, Department of Neurology, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York City, United States
Seonjoo Lee, Mental Health Data Science, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Department of Psychiatry and Biostatistics, Columbia University, New York City, United States
Christian Habeck, Cognitive Neuroscience Division, Department of Neurology, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons; The Taub Institute for Research in Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, Columbia University; The Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center, Columbia University, New York City, United States
Yaakov Stern, Cognitive Neuroscience Division, Department of Neurology, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons; The Taub Institute for Research in Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, Columbia University; The Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center, Columbia University, New York City, United States
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Keyword 1: cognitive reserve
Keyword 2: personality
Keyword 3: neuroimaging: structural
Objective:
Cognitive Reserve is a concept that describes differential susceptibility of cognitive performance to brain pathology. This study investigated whether certain personality traits underlie Cognitive Reserve, as evidenced by better cognitive performance and less cognitive decline in the presence of age-related brain pathologies.
Participants and Methods:
The sample consisted of healthy adults aged 19 to 80 years who possessed questionnaire-derived measures of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, as well as cognitive and brain status data. Performance in the cognitive domains perceptual speed, episodic memory, fluid reasoning and vocabulary was assessed with up to 24 cognitive tasks per participant. Elastic net regularization was used to integrate over 70 structural brain measures into a single brain status score that was calculated separately for each cognitive domain. Both cross-sectional (N=399) and longitudinal analyses (N=275) were performed.
Results:
Openness was related to better performance in all cognitive domains after controlling for brain status (standardised estimates between 0.101 and 0.283). Openness also moderated the association between brain status and change in perceptual speed. Here, it was found that for individuals with high openness, brain status was almost unrelated to decline in perceptual speed. Higher conscientiousness was detrimental for fluid reasoning and led to a faster decline in perceptual speed. Extraversion was associated with lower vocabulary. Extraversion and agreeableness both moderated the association between brain status and perceptual speed. Brain status and perceptual speed were more strongly linked in individuals with high extraversion and low agreeableness. Low neuroticism was related to better vocabulary and faster memory decline. Moreover, neuroticism moderated the relationship between brain change and decline in perceptual speed in the direction that brain status and decline in perceptual speed were less strongly related when neuroticism was low.
Conclusions:
Based on our results and previous publications on personality and cognition and personality and Cognitive Reserve, we conclude that high openness and low neuroticism benefit Cognitive Reserve in general. In contrast, extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness only show differential, domain-specific protection against decreased cognitive performance and cognitive decline in the presence of age-related brain pathologies.
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