Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewEfficiency, capacity, compensation, maintenance, plasticity: emerging concepts in cognitive reserve
Section snippets
The reserve concept
CR (see Glossary) has been proposed to account for the frequent discrepancy between a person's underlying level of brain pathology (or age-related changes) and the observed functional and/or cognitive deficits that are expected to result from that pathology 1, 2. There is extensive epidemiological and experimental evidence for the existence of such reserve: life exposures, such as educational and occupational attainment, and engagement in leisure and social activities have each been associated
Models of reserve
Below we outline some of the dominant theories of preserved cognitive function in the face of advanced age, dementia, and/or brain damage. These theories focus either on compensatory mechanisms (emphasizing adaptations to diminished function or impaired brain structure), neuroprotective mechanisms (emphasizing factors which prevent diminished function and impaired structure), or some combination of both. The main models we discuss are BR, CR, BM, and neurocognitive scaffolding.
Concluding remarks
In this review, we attempted to clarify some of the conceptual relationships between CR and closely related models. As imaging methods become more advanced and macrostructural changes reveal their microstructural correlates, BR and CR may grow more interconnected. Much more fine-grained brain measures are necessary than the standard proxies for BR, such as brain size, and CR can point towards which of these more subtle measures are relevant. BM theories, meanwhile, are complementary to CR, but
Acknowledgements
Supported by NIH/NIA RO1 AG26158.
Glossary
- Brain reserve (BR)
- differences in brain size and other quantitative aspects of the brain that explain differential susceptibility to functional impairment in the presence of pathology or other neurological insult.
- Cognitive reserve (CR)
- differences in cognitive processes as a function of lifetime intellectual activities and other environmental factors that explain differential susceptibility to functional impairment in the presence of pathology or other neurological insult.
- Neural reserve
- one
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