Population ageing increases the importance of cognitive capacity for making decisions about retirement and living independently beyond it. We tested whether post-war education expansion and working-life social mobility eliminate the association between social class of origin and cognition in early old age using the 1958 National Child Development Study. Two outcomes were analysed at age 62: standard episodic memory (immediate + delayed word recall) and long-term episodic memory, capturing accurate half-century recall of childhood household facts (rooms and people at age eleven validated against mothers’ responses).
Social mobility trajectories derived in prior work were classified into predominantly manual versus non-manual class trajectories. Models were estimated separately for women and men across three specifications: (i) social origin and controls, (ii) adding social mobility, and (iii) adding weights to address healthy survivor bias. Education was consistently associated with both outcomes.
For long-term episodic memory, social origin gradients were clearer than for short-term episodic memory, with men from service/professional origins showing a 13 percentage-point higher probability of accurate half-century recall than men from manual origins. These findings indicate that education expansion and working-life social mobility have not completely attenuated the association of social origin with long-term episodic memory. I thank the Economic and Social Research Council which funds the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) Resource Centre (ES/W013142/1) and provides core support for the CLS cohort studies.
While the CLS Resource Centre makes these data available, CLS does not bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of these data by researchers. The CLS cohorts are only possible due to the commitment and enthusiasm of the members, I am grateful for their time and contribution. My work is partly funded by the NIHR Policy Research Unit on Healthy Ageing, University of Manchester.
NIHR Policy Research Unit on Healthy Ageing, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
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