#opennesstoexperience — Public Fediverse posts

DATE: October 2, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Curious people tend to have more of the experiences linked to cognitive reserve, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/curious-people-tend-to-have-more-of-the-experiences-linked-to-cognitive-reserve-study-finds/

A small study in the Netherlands found that people with a more curious personality tended to score higher on indicators of cognitive reserve, such as education and mentally stimulating leisure activities. However, neither curiosity nor these indicators of cognitive reserve were associated with performance on cognitive tests. The paper was published in Personality and Individual Differences.

As people age, many experience gradual cognitive decline. However, not everyone experiences this decline at the same pace or at the same age. While some individuals show marked cognitive decline relatively early, others maintain normal cognitive abilities into very advanced age. To help explain these differences, scientists developed the concept of cognitive reserve.

Cognitive reserve is the brain’s ability to maintain cognitive functioning despite aging, brain injury, or disease-related changes. It is thought to develop gradually across life through experiences that repeatedly engage the brain, such as education, intellectually demanding work, reading, learning new skills, and other mentally stimulating activities. In later life, greater cognitive reserve may help delay or reduce the cognitive effects of brain atrophy and other age-related changes, even though it does not necessarily prevent those physical changes from occurring.

One factor that may be of particular importance for building cognitive reserve is curiosity. Curious people are more likely to seek new information, explore unfamiliar experiences, and continue learning throughout adulthood. Activities encouraged by curiosity, such as reading books, learning languages, or exploring new places and ideas, may provide repeated cognitive stimulation over many years. Research has already linked the personality trait of openness to experience (a trait that also predisposes people to curious behaviors) to slower cognitive decline, suggesting that it may support resilience against it.

Study author Carolien Torenvliet and colleagues at Radboud University’s Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour explored the association between curiosity and various indicators of cognitive reserve. They also examined whether a curious personality (i.e., openness to experience and interest-based curiosity) was associated with cognitive abilities, and whether cognitive reserve might explain any such link.

Study participants were 106 adults recruited mainly from around Nijmegen in the Netherlands. They were between 40 and 85 years of age, with an average age of about 62, and 57% were women. People with current or past psychiatric or neurological disorders were excluded. Participants’ average estimated IQ was 118, well above the population average of 100.

Participants completed three questionnaires assessing curious personality: two measuring interest-based curiosity and one measuring openness to experience. They also completed the Dutch version of the Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire, which estimates cognitive reserve from a person’s education, the complexity of their work, and their leisure activities. Finally, they completed three brief neuropsychological tests measuring memory, executive function, and processing speed.

Results showed that more curious individuals tended to score higher on indicators of cognitive reserve, specifically education and leisure activities, but not the complexity of their work. This association held after accounting for participants’ age. However, neither curiosity nor the cognitive reserve indicators were associated with performance on the cognitive tests.

“Although this study is limited by its cross-sectional design and relatively healthy sample, the results suggest that a curious personality may drive individual differences in cognitively stimulating experiences, but not cognitive abilities themselves,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of cognitive reserve. However, it should be noted that the design of the study does not allow any causal inferences to be drawn from the results. Curiosity may lead people to pursue more education and stimulating activities, but those experiences could also foster curiosity.

In addition, cognitive reserve was estimated from participants’ own reports of their past education, work, and activities rather than measured directly. Finally, participants were healthy and had higher-than-average estimated intelligence, and the sample was relatively small for a study of this type, which may have made it harder to detect links with cognitive performance.

The paper, “Curious people, resilient minds? The role of a curious personality in cognitive reserve and cognitive abilities,” was authored by Carolien Torenvliet, Dirk Bertens, Joukje M. Oosterman, and Iris Wiegand.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/curious-people-tend-to-have-more-of-the-experiences-linked-to-cognitive-reserve-study-finds/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #CuriosityAndCognition #CognitiveReserve #CuriousMinds #OpennessToExperience #MentalStimulation #EducationAndLeisure #CognitiveHealth #AgingAndBrain #Neurocognition #BrainResilience

@johnwehrle I actively seek to learn things that I feel will benefit me over time.

I tend to avoid learning things that are of limited utility --- overly specialised, highly particular, or valid for only a brief time.

Things covers a lot of ground, and can include technical skills, life skills, random trivia, languages, academic topics, current events, contemporary culture, etc., etc.

For tech skills: two of the chief reasons I elected to pursue the Unix / Linux paths in the early 1990s was that 1) they were fun and 2) proprietary computer technologies seemed to be limited both in domains of use and duration of applicability. I'd had exposure by then to CPM, MVS, VMS, DOS, Mac (classic), and ... probably a handful of other techs. Several of those were already obsolete or headed that way. The tools I began learning in the mid-to-late 1980s on university Unix accounts continue to serve me today. There's been some churn, but far less than in other domains.

(The recent trends of configuration management, Docker, K8s, Flatpack, etc., do feel increasingly at odds with this. I could be wrong and/or old.)

I've transferred a huge amount of attention I'd once spent on news and current events to philosophy and history. Both the latter tend to have vastly greater staying and/or explanatory power.

I've been working on a handful of languages to varying degrees of intensity and/or competency for years as well. Two or three I can grasp a gist of meaning from (or even better than that), others are ... still very minimal. That along with my etymological obsession do prove useful in grasping English meanings, however.

#Learning #Knowledge #Skills #OpennessToExperience

Jazz musicians reveal role of expectancy in human creativity

Have you ever wondered how creativity works in the brain? It's a complex and multifaceted concept, and while we don't fully understand it yet, many believe that it involves real-time combinations of known neural and cognitive processes. One interesting model of creativity comes from musical improvisation, like in jazz music, where musicians spontaneously create novel sound sequences. Many researchers believe that creativity involves the integration and combination of known neural and cognitive processes in real-time, allowing individuals to generate novel ideas or solve problems in innovative ways.

One area that has received particular attention in the study of creativity is musical improvisation, which involves the spontaneous creation of novel musical ideas in real-time. In this study, the authors investigate whether individuals with training in musical improvisation, such as jazz musicians, might process expectations differently than individuals without this training. To test this hypothesis, they compare jazz improvisers, non-improvising musicians, and non-musicians in a domain-general task of divergent thinking (which involves generating a large number of creative ideas in response to a given prompt) and a musical task involving preference ratings for chord progressions that vary in terms of their level of expectation. While participants completed these tasks, their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG).

The results of the study showed that jazz musicians preferred unexpected chord progressions in the musical task, and that unexpected stimuli elicited larger early and mid-latency EEG responses (ERAN and P3b) in jazz musicians, followed by smaller long-latency responses (Late Positivity Potential). These EEG responses were also significantly correlated with behavioral measures of fluency and originality on the divergent thinking task. These findings suggest that expectancy may play a role in creativity, and that individuals with training in musical improvisation may process expectations differently than those without this training.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2017.09.008

#creativity #musicalimprovisation #neuralprocesses #divergentthinking #expectancy #EEG #ERP #P3b #LPP #ERAN #divergentthinkingtask #chordprogressions #fluency #originality #expectation #jazzmusicians #non-improvisers #non-musicians #real-time #mentalprocesses #opennesstoexperience #improvisationtraining #artisticexpertise #neuralunderpinnings #deviance #unexpectedevents #P3 #noveltydetection #arousal #engagement #MismatchNegativity #auditoryprediction #comparison #musicalsyntax #learning #experience #emotion #meaninginmusic #motivatingevents #affectiveappraisal #sensorydomains #motorcontrol #languageproduction #music #jazz #musicians #chords