Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Adapt as We Grow Older?
Use the definitions to ask what the sensory-cognitive association alone cannot tell us. Keep proposed mechanisms separate from the measures used as evidence for them.
A question to consider. If two older adults perform equally well but show different brain activity, what else would you need to distinguish reserve, maintenance, and compensation?
Why this reading
Terms such as reserve and compensation can name an observation without explaining it. This conceptual review asks what evidence would justify each interpretation of a brain and behavior finding.
Before you read
The authors distinguish accumulated neural resources, their preservation, and recruitment that helps meet a task's demands. An imaging measure is evidence about a process, not a direct reading of its purpose. A proxy, such as education, is not the resource itself.
Read for
- Use Figure 1 to compare the proposed processes and the timescales on which they operate.
- Explain why greater brain activity alone does not meet the authors' criteria for compensation.
- Ask which comparisons could distinguish initial differences in resources from their maintenance over time.
Consider afterwards
- Older adults recruit an additional brain region during a memory task. What evidence would justify calling that recruitment helpful compensation?
Editorial context
This is an Opinion article proposing clearer definitions, with continuing disagreement acknowledged. Its focus is cognitive neuroscience, not a complete model of well-being. Two 2018 notices accompany it: an author correction and a publisher correction reversing incorrectly colored age-group bars in Figure 3b. The linked university copy identifies both corrections.