Leisure activities and working memory in older age: The mediating roles of affect and cortisol.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Leisure activities may protect cognitive performance in older age, but the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. This study examined the short-term time-lagged associations between leisure activities that are minimally physically active (e.g., meeting friends; hereinafter referred to as "leisure activities") and working memory, and whether affect and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (i.e., cortisol) mediate such associations. We examined 7,928 observations provided by 235 participants (aged 56-88 years, 49% women) from the German socioeconomic panel. Over 7 days, participants reported their leisure activities and affect (i.e., valence and arousal), completed an ambulatory working memory task, and provided saliva samples five times per day. Results from multivariate multilevel time series analyses show that a bout of leisure activity (that happened within the recent 3 hr) was associated with subsequent better working memory performance as captured 6 hr later, but not 3 hr later or at the same time. Moreover, high- and low-arousal positive affect and low-arousal negative affect mediated the temporal association. That is, a bout of leisure activity was associated with concurrent more high- and low-arousal positive affect and less low-arousal negative affect, which were associated with subsequent better working memory performance. In contrast, high-arousal negative affect and cortisol did not mediate the association. In addition, we observed heterogeneity across participants and reported generalizability of our hypothesis on leisure activities that are physically active (e.g., walking). In conclusion, engagement in leisure activities may have short-term benefits for working memory performance by enhancing affective well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".