Want Sharper Working Memory With Age? Build This First
Your brain is constantly juggling information.
You might hold onto what someone just told you while planning your response, remember a few items while making a decision, or keep track of several steps in a task.
That mental juggling is working memory, and it tends to become less efficient with age.
But a new study suggests1 that two things you build over time, cognitive reserve and emotional intelligence, may be connected to how well your working memory performs later in life.
About the study
Researchers in Italy studied 45 healthy adults between 65 and 84 to examine how cognitive reserve and emotional intelligence related to working memory.
Cognitive reserve refers to mental resources built through experiences such as education, mentally demanding work, learning, and social or cultural activities. Emotional intelligence involves recognizing, understanding, and managing emotions in yourself and others.
Participants completed a face-matching task. They viewed a series of happy, angry, or neutral faces and had to remember whether each matched a face they had seen earlier.
In some trials, they focused on the person's emotion; in others, they focused on age and ignored the expression. Researchers measured how accurately and quickly participants responded and compared those results with their cognitive reserve and emotional intelligence scores.
Cognitive reserve was linked to greater accuracy
People with higher cognitive reserve were more accurate across the task, regardless of how long they had to remember the information or which emotion the faces showed.
Emotional intelligence was linked to response speed, but only in certain situations.
When participants focused on age, those with higher emotional intelligence responded faster to happy faces. When they focused on the emotional expression, they responded more slowly. This pattern didn't appear with angry or neutral faces.
Researchers didn't investigate why these differences occurred, so the findings show a relationship rather than cause and effect.
Why your experiences may matter
The cognitive reserve finding fits with the idea that years of mentally stimulating experiences may give the brain more resources to draw on as it ages.
That includes more than brain-training exercises. Education, demanding work, hobbies, social activities, and other experiences that require learning or adapting may all contribute to cognitive reserve.
Long-term habits appear to matter as well, with one pattern in adulthood linked to worse brain health later on.
The study was small and included only healthy older adults, so it can't establish cause and effect or tell us whether the same patterns occur earlier in life.
The researchers also noted that happy and angry faces differ in intensity, which could have influenced participants' responses.
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- Keep learning: Take on a new language, skill, hobby, or subject that challenges you, or work in a few mind-sharpening exercises.
- Stay mentally and socially engaged: Mentally demanding work, cultural activities, hobbies, and social connection can keep your brain processing new information.
- Practice emotional awareness: Emotional intelligence showed a more specific relationship with response speed. Noticing your emotions and practicing how you respond may help you become more intentional during emotionally charged moments.
The takeaway
This small study suggests that cognitive reserve may help support working-memory accuracy as we age, while emotional intelligence may influence response speed in certain situations.
Keeping your mind engaged throughout life is one practical way to support cognitive resilience.