Everyday Reading, Personality, and Cognitive Health in Older Adults

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Epidemiological evidence suggests that education and lifelong literacy have strong benefits for cognition and health in later adulthood. There is also increased understanding of reading as engendering a highly active mental state that is underpinned by a cascade of neural activity. Finally, studies contrasting illiterates and literates within carefully matched populations also suggest that literacy plays an important role in shaping mind and brain. Yet, behavioral research on the benefits of leisure reading have been largely restricted to younger populations and to effects in the domain of language processing. Relatively little is known about the more acute effects of habitual reading in adulthood or the causal mechanisms through which literacy engagement might impact cognitive health in late life ? or the dispositional mechanisms through which such engagement is sustained. We request funding to initiate a research program on literacy-based interventions to enhance cognition and traits theorized to promote habitual engagement in intellectual challenge. In this exploratory (R21) project, we will examine whether a sustained period of reading engagement has measurable effects on cognition in later adulthood. Reading represents a readily accessible form of mental stimulation, and yet has received very little systematic study as a pathway to cognitive health. In this project, we will develop an electronic tablet app to present extended text materials and control activities (e.g., puzzles), as well as to record selections and time allocation. This technology will enable us (1) to use an experimental design to contrast the effects of a program of reading engagement against a non-reading active control on behavioral targets among adults with relatively underdeveloped literacy practices, where (2) these targets are (a) core language processes (e.g., fluency, efficiency of word recognition, improved semantic processing), (b) domain- general processes (e.g., working memory, episodic memory, executive control), and (c) selected dispositions (in particular, openness to experience). We will also explore (3) the extent to which the effects of acute literacy experience vary with pretest levels of literacy skills, literacy experience, and dispositional traits. This project will pave the way for a more systematic study of the long-term effects of literacy on cognitive health and its underlying mechanisms.