Although there is robust evidence that socioeconomic position influences later-life cognitive function, two issues limit knowledge regarding the nature and magnitude of these relationships and potential policy interventions. First, most social science research tends to treat cognition as a unitary concept despite evidence that cognitive outcomes are not interchangeable. Second, most biomedical research focuses exclusively on education, with limited attention to economic resources despite robust social science theoretical and empirical rationales for their role. Relatedly, there has been limited attention to how these relationships may vary across cohorts, even as educational and economic contexts have changed. Using the Health and Retirement Study (N = 36,494), we show that failing to attend to different facets of cognition, socioeconomic resources, and cohort differences leads to underestimates in the magnitude of educational and economic disparities in cognitive function and decline. This has important implications for appropriate policy interventions to address these disparities.

中文翻译：

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低估关系：解开社会经济资源和认知功能以及中年到晚年的衰退


尽管有强有力的证据表明社会经济地位会影响晚年的认知功能，但有两个问题限制了关于这些关系的性质和大小以及潜在政策干预的知识。首先，大多数社会科学研究倾向于将认知视为一个单一的概念，尽管有证据表明认知结果是不可互换的。其次，大多数生物医学研究只关注教育，尽管其作用有强大的社会科学理论和实证理由，但对经济资源的关注有限。与此相关的是，即使教育和经济环境已经发生变化，人们对这些关系在不同群体中如何变化的关注也有限。使用健康与退休研究 （N = 36,494），我们表明，未能关注认知、社会经济资源和队列差异的不同方面会导致低估认知功能和衰退的教育和经济差异的大小。这对于解决这些差异的适当政策干预具有重要意义。