Ageing effects on decoding social cues

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Ageing effects on decoding social cues J. H. Wan1* and T. M. Lee1 1 The University of Hong Kong, Laboratory of Neuropsychology, China Social cognition relies heavily on prefrontal functioning [1]. Yet, prefrontal regions are highly susceptible to an ageing effect [2]. Hence, we hypothesized that normal ageing was associated with declined social cognitive performance. We studied the ability in decoding social cues, namely mentalizing (the ability to decode the mental state of other people) and emotion recognition (the ability to decode the emotion of others via reading facial expression), of 100 Chinese healthy volunteers, 51 younger (M=27.1) and 49 older adults (M=75.6). The measures employed were the social Faux Pas test [3] and the Eyes test [4]. In the Faux pas test, participants need to infer mental states by understanding interactions between characters. The Eyes test, on the other hand, requires participants to attribute mental states from eye gazes. Findings on the Faux Pas test showed no significant group difference, but that on the Eyes test clearly indicated a positive ageing effect on performance. The observed differential effect of normal ageing on mentalizing and emotion recognition suggests that multiple neural mechanisms are involved in decoding social cues.