The paper, which appears online in the December issue of the journal, is titled The Effects of an Engaged Lifestyle on Cognitive Vitality: A Field Experiment. The researchers report on their study in which older adults were randomly assigned to a program that would “operationalize an engaged lifestyle.”

Using the Senior Odyssey program developed by Stine-Morrow, their findings are some of the first to report experimental data on the effects of engagement on cognitive decline. The abstract for the paper states that the study “provides experimental evidence for the proposition that engagement, in the absence of specific ability training, can mitigate age-related cognitive declines in fluid ability.”

Co-authors of the paper are Beckman colleague Dan Morrow, Jeanine Parisi from the University of Illinois and Denise Park from the University of Texas at Dallas.

For more on the paper, click here.