Cognitive reserve differently impacts cognition and metacognition across domains

Preservative effects of cognitive reserve on age-related decline has been widely studied in episodic memory, however less is known about how cognitive reserve influences other domains such as semantic memory or visual perception. Similarly, recent studies suggest that the decline of metacognition observed with age might be reduced by cognitive reserve in the memory domain, but the domain-generally of such effect remains unexplored. This study is part of a published experiment investigating the effect of age on cognition and metacognition in episodic memory, semantic memory, executive functioning, and visual perception (Meunier-Duperray et al., 2025). Here, we focused on the effect of cognitive reserve on cognition and metacognition in a subsample of 319 participants (aged from 18 to 79). For both cognition and metacognition, we expected an effect of cognitive reserve only on tasks sensitive to age-related decline: episodic memory, executive functioning, and visual perception for cognition and episodic and semantic tasks for metacognition. For cognition, results showed an effect of cognitive reserve (except for visual perception), but no interaction with age. A similar pattern was found for metacognition but only for semantic memory. These results suggest that cognitive reserve acts in a domain-specific way, irrespectively of age in this cohort.