The importance of cognitive endurance

Schooling may build human capital not only by teaching academic skills, but by expanding the capacity for cognition itself. We focus specifically on cognitive endurance: the ability to sustain effortful mental activity over a continuous stretch of time. As motivation, we document that globally and in the US, the poor exhibit cognitive fatigue more quickly than the rich across field settings; they also attend schools that offer fewer opportunities to practice thinking for continuous stretches. Using a field experiment with 1,600 Indian primary school students, we randomly increase the amount of time students spend in sustained cognitive activity during the school day—using either math problems (mimicking good schooling) or non-academic games (providing a pure test of our mechanism). Each approach markedly improves cognitive endurance: students show 22% less decline in performance over time when engaged in intellectual activities—listening comprehension, academic problems, or IQ tests. They also exhibit increased attentiveness in the classroom and score higher on psychological measures of sustained attention. Moreover, each treatment improves students’ school performance by 0.09 standard deviations. This indicates that the experience of effortful thinking itself—even when devoid of any subject content—increases the ability to accumulate traditional human capital. Finally, we complement these results with quasi-experimental variation indicating that an additional year of schooling improves cognitive endurance, but only in higher-quality schools. Our findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage poor children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity.

Here is the full paper by Christina Brown, Supreet Kaur, Geeta Kingdon, and Heather Schofield, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

I should note that I view this as one of the areas where I feel I have trained myself best.  I recall last year having serious airport travel problems, and a trip that should have taken two hours ended up being almost twelve hours, with uncertainty along the way and two different last-minute improvised airport stops and no lounges.  But I still was able to read, concentrate, and work for the entire period without feeling any major drain.  As for this paper, it is yet another way that schooling teaches the median student something, even though he/she cannot regurgitate any particular lesson on demand.