Don't Lose Your Brain at Work - The Role of Recurrent Novelty at Work in Cognitive and Brain Aging.

Jan Oltmanns,Ursula M Staudinger,Ben Godde,Axel H Winneke,Götz Richter,Claudia Niemann,Klaus Schömann,Claudia Voelcker-Rehage

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00117

Abstract

Cognitive and brain aging is strongly influenced by everyday settings such as work demands. Long-term exposure to low job complexity, for instance, has detrimental effects on cognitive functioning and regional gray matter (GM) volume. Brain and cognition, however, are also characterized by plasticity. We postulate that the experience of novelty (at work) is one important trigger of plasticity. We investigated the cumulative effect of recurrent exposure to work-task changes (WTC) at low levels of job complexity on GM volume and cognitive functioning of middle-aged production workers across a time window of 17 years. In a case-control study, we found that amount of WTC was associated with better processing speed and working memory as well as with more GM volume in brain regions that have been associated with learning and that show pronounced age-related decline. Recurrent novelty at work may serve as an ‘in vivo’ intervention that helps counteracting debilitating long-term effects of low job complexity.

Highlights

Occupational health psychology aims to support the creation of “healthy workplaces in which people may produce, serve, grow, and be valued” (Quick et al, 1997, p. 3)
Due to the rather small sample size, the behavioral hypotheses were tested via one Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) - rather than using multilevel modeling – with (a) a composite score for the visual search task built from averaged z-scores of the median reaction time per correct trial and from z-scores of the accuracy in the visual search task, (b) z-scores of the number of correct trials within 80 s in the identical pictures test, and (c) a composite z-score of the accuracies in the 1- and 2back task as dependent variables
A composite Lifetime of Experiences Questionnaire (LEQ) score and its interaction with work-task changes (WTC) as well as an average z-score of voluntariness in WTC served as covariates

Summary

Introduction

Occupational health psychology aims to support the creation of “healthy workplaces in which people may produce, serve, grow, and be valued” (Quick et al, 1997, p. 3). Occupational health psychology aims to support the creation of “healthy workplaces in which people may produce, serve, grow, and be valued” Cognitive and brain health have been neglected as focal points in occupational health research and rarely are they studied across time. That is surprising as (a) the workforce is aging in most Western countries, (b) many cognitive abilities on average decline with increasing age, and (c) working conditions have been shown to impact the development of cognitive and brain health across the lifespan (e.g., Schooler et al, 1999). The present study aims to fill this gap and investigates work settings which foster positive cognitive and neural plasticity across time

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