Ten-year longitudinal trajectories of older adults' basic and everyday cognitive abilities

To examine the longitudinal trajectories of everyday cognition and longitudinal associations with basic (i.e., laboratory and experimentally measured) cognitive abilities, including verbal memory, inductive reasoning, visual processing speed, and vocabulary.

Participants were healthy older adults drawn from the no-treatment control group (N = 698) of the Advanced Cognitive Training for the Independent and Vital Elderly (Willis et al., 2006) randomized trial and were assessed at baseline and 1, 2, 3, 5, and 10 years later. Analyses were conducted using latent growth models.

Modeling revealed an overall inverted-U shape (quadratic) trajectory across cognitive domains. Among basic cognitive predictors, level and slope in reasoning demonstrated the closest association to level and slope of everyday cognition, and accounted for most of the individual differences in linear gain in everyday cognition.

Everyday cognition is not buffered against decline, and is most closely related to inductive reasoning in healthy older adults. To establish the clinical utility of everyday cognitive measures, future research should examine these associations in samples with more cognitive impairment.