ABSTRACT

Increasing age may be associated with better ability to carry out social and emotional problem solving. Physical activity may benefit cognitive functioning of older adults by increasing cerebral blood flow. If deliberate engagement with activities in order to maintain cognitive functioning is effective it would be expected that deliberate engagers would show a reduced effect of age with measures of fluid function and real world problem solving. Mental activity levels make a separate contribution to predicting current fluid functioning in addition to the contributions from age and deprivation category. Mental activity score was not associated with performance on real world problem solving tasks. Simultaneous multiple regressions were carried out with the activity indices, age, gender, deprivation category, health and to predict both fluid and real world factor scores. There was a general belief that engaging in mental activities was important for good cognitive functioning. This was most often an effortful mental activity.