Late-life cognition: Do childhood conditions play any role?

Individual's cognitive ability tends to reduce with ageing. Recently, whether and how to buffer this age-related decline is one of the greatest concerns. One well-established hypothesis argues that early life conditions play a particularly crucial role in developing individual's cognitive skills. People who grew up in good conditions are more likely to obtain a higher level of cognitive stocks and are more efficient producers of cognitive skills. In this paper, we analyze the impact of childhood conditions on the individuals' late life cognitive functioning by addressing the question whether the same change in age will have different consequences on the late life cognition given different levels of childhood conditions based on the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data. Our empirical evidence supports that more advantageous childhood conditions can shave off the decline of cognition as measured by word recall with ageing after controlling for individual fixed effects.