Gaining or losing wisdom: Developmental trends in theory of mind in old age

Abstract

Theory of mind (ToM) is a tool in the field of social cognition that is employed to judge and predict others’ intentions, motives, and psychological states. At present, studies on the development of ToM in older adults have offered some meaningful insights. However, researchers still lack an overall understanding of the differences of ToM abilities based on different age brackets. Accordingly, the present study utilized a variety of tasks to investigate the development of ToM in the elderly at different ages. The results demonstrated that: (1) The ToM abilities showed a declined tendency with the increasing age. (2) While overall, different types of ToM tasks varied in accordance with each age brackets. In the double emotion task, the development of ToM abilities showed no difference among three groups of people aged 65–74, 75–79, 80–84, while in comparison, the people aged 85–89 had a notable decline in ToM abilities. In the double bluff task, the ToM abilities of people aged 65–74 were notably stronger than that of the people aged 85–89, while the other groups did not varied much. In the false belief task, ToM abilities of people aged 65–74 were significantly stronger than that of people aged 65–74 and 85–89, while the other groups did not varied much. In the second-order false belief task, the ToM abilities of people aged 65–74 and 75–79 were greatly stronger than that of other two groups that had similar results. In the faux pas task, the ToM abilities of people aged 65–74 were notably stronger than that of other three groups, people aged 75–79 than that of 85–89, while other groups showed no difference. In general, the ToM abilities of the elderly displayed the inner consistency of development, but manifested particularity in different tasks.