Cognition in context: towards a human geography of place, power, and cognitive health across the life course

Cognability offers human geography a timely conceptual framework to examine cognitive aging as a lifelong accumulation of place-based exposures and opportunities that shape how people think, remember, orient, connect, and sustain personhood. As public health and neuroscience increasingly turn to the ‘exposome’ to understand multifaceted environmental risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, human geography is needed to deepen understanding of the exposome through its theoretically and analytically rich attention to place, scale, power, identity, and embodiment. Cognability as a concept can bridge biomedical approaches and human geography. It asks not only which services, amenities, and hazards matter for dementia risk; but also how environments are produced, experienced, and perceived across the life course. This paper extends cognability beyond dementia prevention to consider everyday cognitive life, which includes the cognitive affordances and obstacles embedded in homes, neighbourhoods, institutions, technologies, and care environments. It introduces cognableism as a critical geographic concept to examine how places privilege normative cognitive capacities while marginalising neurodiversity. This paper outlines a research agenda to study cognitive health and neurodiversity as spatial, relational, and justice oriented. Cognability invites geographers to reconsider cognition as something navigated through often-disabling environments, uneven built and social infrastructures, and more-than-human relations.