to sum up, both the results in the literature and those from the present investigation lend support to the hypothesis of disuse (Denney, 1982, 1989), according to which deterioration in healthy elderly persons may to a great extent be due to the lack of certain abilities. Thus, our data confirm that those individuals who maintain, in spite of their age, an active lifestyle also present high levels of cognitive performance cognitive plasticity. This is a highly relevant finding since it situates the person as active agent of his or her level of performance rather than leaving it in the hands of biological or purely random factors, over which he/she has no control. We realize that the selective nature of the sample investigated (most of them elderly people with low educational level and living in residences for the aged) can limit the generalization of the findings. For this resson, we think that this research should be repeated on a larger sample of people.