Modelling the Effects of Demographics and Lifestyle on Cognitive Performance

Human cognitive performance is ultimately the result of many factors. Previous inquiries note the contributions of demographic and lifestyle cognitive performance. I used a series of structural equation models and dimensionality reduction methods to identify how demographic and lifestyle measures simultaneously contribute to cognitive performance: a theory-driven model using combined measures of cognitive performance and latent variable structure; and a data- driven model using principal components analysis. Participants (N = 1141, Mage = 23.13 years) completed a battery of tasks and questionnaires measuring cognitive performance and collecting demographic and lifestyle measures. Overall, both models provided evidence that the inclusion of lifestyle measures over and above demographic measures accounted for and predicted cognitive performance. Further, the two models give rise to complementary but distinct insights into the basic components of cognitive performance. This work provides a methodology and evidence for accounting for difference in cognitive performance with demographic and lifestyle measures.