Beyond the classroom: how high school extracurricular activities shape cognitive health in later life

We test whether adolescent cognitive, social, and physical activities in addition to school (i.e., extracurricular activities) are associated with cognitive performance in older adulthood.

We analyze data from the 2018 Project Talent Aging Study, a non-representative sample of participants from the 1960 Project Talent, a large-scale study of U.S. high school students. Our analytic sample includes 2,405 participants who completed testing of verbal fluency and word recall at an average age of 75 years. We measured three categories of extracurricular activities: cognitive, social, and physical/athletic. We used multilevel modeling to account for clustering of students within schools while controlling for individual and school-level covariates.

Greater adolescent cognitive extracurricular activity was significantly associated with better verbal fluency, and to a lesser extent, recall, in later life. Social and physical extracurricular activities were not significantly associated with verbal fluency or recall performance.

Our findings show that cognitive extracurricular activities in adolescence build cognitive reserve and support verbal fluency and word recall across the life course. These results highlight the important role of early-life experiences for healthy cognitive aging and suggest that promoting extracurricular cognitive engagement during adolescence may have lasting cognitive benefits.