Abstract
Preservative effects of cognitive reserve on age-related decline have been widely studied in episodic memory, however less is known about how cognitive reserve influences other domains such as semantic memory or visual perception. Similarly, recent studies suggest that the decline of metacognition observed with age might be reduced by cognitive reserve in the memory domain, but the domain-generality of such effect remains unexplored. This study is part of a published study investigating the effect of age on cognition and metacognition in episodic memory, semantic memory, executive functioning, and visual perception (Meunier-Duperray et al., 2025). Here, we focused on cognitive reserve measured by the CRIq on cognition (i.e., task performance) and metacognition in a subsample of 319 participants (aged from 18 to 79). We expected an effect of cognitive reserve only on tasks sensitive to age-related decline: episodic memory, executive functioning, and visual perception for task performance and episodic and semantic tasks for metacognition. Overall, these results suggest evidence for the null hypothesis for the effect of cognitive reserve on the age-related decline in cognition and metacognition. Only anecdotal to small evidence was found for an effect of cognitive reserve on episodic memory performance across the lifespan suggesting that reserve reflects earlier individual differences rather than differences in the rate of decline. However, the low variability of our high-reserve sample may have masked some effects.