Relationship between fitness and cognitive performance in younger and older adults

Abstract

The present study investigated the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and cognitive ageing. An extreme groups comparison design compared the performance of 24 young low-fitness adults, 24 young high-fitness adults, 24 older low-fitness adults and 24 older high-fitness adults on a comprehensive neuropsychological battery. A series of ANCOVAs demonstrated that younger adults performed better than older adults on most cognitive tasks. Additionally, across both age groups high-fitness adults performed at a higher level than low-fitness adults on tasks of basic abilities, i.e., simple reaction time, attention, working memory and processing speed. However, there were no differences between the fitness groups in terms of performance on higher-order fluid abilities, i.e., executive function and memory. These findings suggest that the relationship between fitness and cognitive ageing is domain specific.

Keywords:

• Cardiorespiratory fitness
• ageing
• cognition

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the participation of all the men and women who volunteered for this study. We thank Danielle Steel and Judith Slater for their assistance with data collection.