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• Posted July 10, 2026

Seniors Know How Sharp They Are At Any Given Time, Study Finds

Seniors have a pretty good handle on how sharp they are at any given moment, a new study says.

Self-ratings captured by smartwatches closely matched seniors' actual brain performance in real-time everyday settings, researchers reported recently in the journal Neuropsychology.

“We found that people’s moment-to-moment impressions of their cognitive abilities were closely aligned with their actual performance,” said senior researcher Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, a professor of neurology at the University of California-Davis.

“This could help lead to possible earlier detection of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s risk than standard cognitive testing,” she said in a news release.

For the new study, researchers recruited 162 seniors with an average age of 72. All of the participants were worried about slips in their memory or thinking ability but had scored within normal limits on standard cognitive tests.

For one week, participants received prompts on an Apple Watch four times a day, asking them to rate their sharpness and their mood. The watch also provided brief cognitive tasks to test their processing speed and attention.

“Usually, in a clinic or a research setting, we have people do tests and ask them to retrospectively say how much they have problems with their memory. A lot of times, their test results and how they perceive their memory problem aren't correlated,” Tomaszewski Farias explained.

But this method captured both the people’s brain power — and their own assessment of their capabilities — in real time.

“When the participants were performing cognitive tests and rating their mental sharpness, it was happening throughout their day — whether they were doing chores at home or out shopping," Tomaszewski Farias said. "We were capturing their cognition in real time, rather than having them come into a clinic where it's very quiet and in a very artificial contrived environment.”

Results showed that people’s perception of their own mental sharpness tracks with their actual performance. When they felt like they were a bit duller than usual, their cognitive test scores indeed showed a slight dip.

This perception was independent of their mood, researchers added. Feeling depressed didn’t have any bearing on their self-assessment of their mental sharpness, or on their actual brain performance.

“It was exciting to find that the mood didn't play a big role in the relationship between how they felt, how sharp they felt and how they performed on the cognitive test,” Tomaszewski Farias said. “This suggests that measuring subjective cognition in the moment may be more sensitive to objective cognitive performance — and less impacted by depression than measured in the clinic or laboratory.”

The team also found that time of day affected thinking, with sharper thinking earlier in the day.

“We often tell patients in clinic to do things that are more cognitively demanding earlier in the day,” Tomaszewski Farias added. “This study potentially supports such recommendations.”

More information

Harvard Medical School has tips for keeping your mind sharp.

SOURCE: University of California-Davis, news release, July 2, 2026