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Feeling anxious or struggling to keep pace in school during early adolescence is linked to how people view their own memory abilities more than fifty years later. The findings suggest that early-life psychological health can have a lasting association with how individuals perceive their cognitive decline in older age. The research was published in Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.
Subjective memory refers to a person’s own perception of their everyday memory functioning. This includes noticing how often they forget where they placed an item, lose track of a conversation, or fail to recall something they were just told. As people age, it is incredibly common to experience and report these types of memory difficulties. Some older adults report no changes, whereas others feel their memory is steadily declining.
Scientists are interested in these self-reported memory complaints because they can sometimes serve as an early warning sign for dementia. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that greater declines in self-reported memory over time were associated with higher levels of Alzheimer’s-related proteins in the brain. At the same time, a 2014 meta-analysis found that people’s self-rated memory issues only weakly match their actual memory test scores. Because subjective memory and objective memory often differ, researchers have begun exploring how emotional and psychological traits influence self-reported cognitive decline.
Historically, much of the research on cognitive aging has focused on risk factors present in middle or late adulthood. However, scientists are increasingly looking to the very beginning of life to understand how early experiences shape the aging process. For example, a 2004 study demonstrated that cognitive abilities measured in childhood continue to predict mental performance and health many decades later in old age. Conditions such as a family’s socioeconomic status can dictate a child’s early opportunities, setting them on a path that affects their long-term brain health.
The research, led by Gideon Neidenmark, a doctoral student at Örebro University in Sweden, aimed to understand how an array of childhood factors might forecast memory complaints in old age. The authors noted that existing research rarely tracks individuals from early childhood all the way into their late sixties. By bridging this gap, they hoped to see whether childhood intelligence, social well-being, or school anxiety could predict how people evaluate their own memories nearly six decades later.
“I am fortunate enough to be involved in a longitudinal study called the IDA-project with data spanning six decades,” Neidenmark told PsyPost. “This has enabled questions regarding how our childhood and adolescence are related to our abilities when we get older.”
“I became especially interested in subjective memory because previous research has demonstrated that our own experience of our memory abilities usually does not overlap substantially with our actual memory performance and wanted to understand why that is,” he added.
To investigate this, the researchers used data from the IDA-project, a massive Swedish longitudinal study that began in 1965. They tracked a cohort of participants who were around 10 years old at the start of the study, assessing them again in 1968 at age 13. During these childhood visits, participants completed standardized tests measuring their verbal, spatial, and reasoning abilities. The researchers also gathered official school grades, collected information on the families’ socioeconomic status, and asked the children to fill out questionnaires about their social well-being and any anxiety they experienced in the school context.
In 2022, the researchers sent follow-up questionnaires to the surviving participants, who were now about 67 years old. A total of 625 people completed this phase of the study. The participants filled out a standardized survey detailing their current subjective memory, answering questions about how often they forget things in their daily lives. They also completed a widely used assessment to measure their current levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms.
When analyzing the data, the researchers found that participants who reported higher levels of school anxiety at age 13 tended to report worse subjective memory at age 67. This association was specific to psychological health during early adolescence. Interestingly, the researchers did not find evidence that school anxiety at age 10 predicted memory complaints later in life.
This link between early adolescent anxiety and late-life memory complaints remained steady even after the researchers accounted for the participants’ current anxiety and depressive symptoms.
“I think the most important take-home message is that our childhood and adolescence are related to our abilities in later life, particularly that our psychological health in our youth is related to how we perceive and rate our own memory abilities,” Neidenmark said. “This also persists even when we account for current psychological health.”
In contrast, several other childhood factors did not predict subjective memory in older age. The researchers found no evidence that cognitive ability, school grades, social well-being, or family socioeconomic status at ages 10 or 13 had any bearing on how participants viewed their memory at age 67.
“I think what surprised me the most was that social well-being, socioeconomic status, cognitive ability and school performance during childhood and adolescence were not related to subjective memory in later life,” Neidenmark explained. “It really emphasized what previous literature has found, i.e., that subjective memory may better reflect psychological factors than actual memory performance.”
The findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that depression during adolescence was associated with lower cognitive performance over the next six years. The new study extends this timeline considerably, tracking participants over nearly six decades. It is worth noting, however, that the new study focused exclusively on self-reported memory complaints in older age rather than objective cognitive test performance.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The childhood questionnaires used to measure school anxiety and social well-being relied on only a few items, which resulted in relatively low statistical reliability for those specific measures. This lack of precision might explain why factors like early social well-being did not show a relationship with late-life memory complaints. Better measurement tools might yield different results in future studies.
“Like with any articles, we should be cautious about considering these findings as fact or infer causality,” Neidenmark pointed out. “As mentioned, we should be cautious about considering lower psychological health as causing lower subjective memory. Rather, they are related to each other even over such a large time span.”
Additionally, the recent follow-up phase of the study did not include objective memory tests or medical screenings for dementia. Because of this, the researchers could not determine if the participants’ memory complaints reflected actual cognitive decline or merely a pessimistic view of their abilities. The study also experienced attrition over its 57-year span, and the individuals who remained in the project at age 67 generally had better childhood grades and better psychological health than those who dropped out.
Future research could explore whether there is a direct chain of events linking early-life psychological health to late-life memory. Scientists might also look at mid-life factors that could bridge the gap between teenage anxiety and aging. Understanding these pathways could help health professionals design interventions that support both emotional well-being and lifelong cognitive health.
“However, this study and findings could indicate the importance of considering early-life for prevention,” Neidenmark noted. “This study in particular may point to psychological health (in particular school anxiety) as an important factor to consider in this work.”
“My next step is to investigate how these factors in childhood and adolescence are related to actual memory performance and brain structure in later life,” he said. “I hope to understand how this differs to my results from this study, and how they are related.”
The study, “Early life predictors of subjective cognitive function in older age: Emerging longitudinal associations over six decades,” was authored by Gideon Neidenmark, Catherine Tuvblad, and Jonas Persson.