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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.1987
igaa057.1987
Abstracts
Session 5595 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Temporal Relationship Between Activity Engagement and Cognition
Jung Seojung 1 Siedlecki Karen 2 1 
SUNY College at Old Westbury, Old Westbury, New York, United States
2 
Fordham University, New York, New York, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”592 592
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Previous studies have shown that activity engagement is related to cognitive function. However, few studies have examined the temporal order between activity engagement and various domains of cognition. Using data from the Virginia Cognitive Aging Project (baseline N =5430, Mage =51.28, SD =18.12), we examined the temporal relationships between engagement in physical and cognitive activity and different cognitive domains (reasoning, spatial visualization, episodic memory, processing speed, vocabulary) after controlling for age, education, self-rated health and depression. Cross-lagged panel analyses indicate that very few of the temporal relationships between activity level and cognition were significant except higher levels of cognitive activity significantly predicted better future processing speed, but not the reverse. Findings suggest the importance of engaging in cognitively stimulating activities, which help adults preserve processing speed over time. This study also highlights the importance of longitudinal design on various domains of cognition to help develop domain-specific interventions.