Healthy cognitive ability is an important prerequisite for delayed retirement. Clarification of retirement on cognitive ability is helpful for the implementation of the delayed retirement policy. Previous studies have focused on the effects of retirement on individual cognitive ability, but ignoring the spillover effects of spousal retirement on cognitive ability among couples. Based on the extended health needs model and social interaction theory, this paper constructed a theoretical model to analyze how spousal retirement has a spillover effect of spouse retirement on cognitive ability in dual-earner couple families, and decomposed the total spillover effect into a direct spillover effect and an indirect spillover effect. An empirical test was conducted with the help of five rounds of data from the 2010-2018 China Family Panel Studies data, combining the joint cubic equation system and fuzzy breakpoint regression method. The results show that retirement not only individual cognitive decline, but also has a negative direct spillover effect on the cognitive ability of the spouse, and also has a negative indirect spillover effect through the social interaction between husband and wife. Wives’ s cognitive abilities are adversely affected by spouse retirement than their husbands. The results of the mechanism test using the multiple mediated effects model show that, in addition to social interaction between couples, the family economic decline after the spousal retirement is an important channel. Frequent alcohol consumption was the cause for the decline of cognitive ability of husbands after wives’ retirement, where increased exercise frequency can alleviate the negative spillover effect to a certain extent. The increase of spousal’ s contribution to housework after retirement is beneficial to the improvement of husbands’ cognitive ability, but has no significant effect on wives’ cognitive ability. In response to above findings, it is suggested that government should focus on the family, make reasonable use of the social interaction between couples, and take appropriate measures that balance the promotion of the delayed retirement policy with the national cognition health, to reduce or even avoid the adverse effects of retirement age reform.
