People must acquire new skills throughout life to maintain social participation, independence, and health. Older adults face special learning challenges, but differences among older adults are best understood in a lifespan perspective because learning in childhood prepare for later learning. Effects of early inequalities may therefore magnify during life because they are related to further learning. Knowledge about the challenges that older adults face, the factors that explain differences in learning, and the ways to facilitate learning later in life remain scarce. Societies are therefore unprepared for supporting learning throughout life. To fill these gaps in knowledge, we will study learning in a large sample of older adults who took part in a high-quality data collection of schooling-related variables when they were children. This approach allows us to identify factors in childhood that predict lifelong learning ability, chart the challenges that older adults face, and identify the characteristics of individuals that struggle with learning in older age. The subjects will also be genotyped to allow for separation of genetic and probable environmental sources of differences in learning. Equipped with this knowledge, we will develop interventions aimed to facilitate learning in older age and examine their effects on learning capacity and wellbeing in randomized-controlled trials that target individuals in need of intervention.