Impaired remapping of social relationships in older adults

Jan Oltmer,Esther Kuehn,Thomas Wolbers

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-01258-7

Abstract

Social relationships are a central aspect of our everyday life, yet our ability to change established social relationships is an under-investigated topic. Here, we use the concept of cognitive mapping to investigate the plasticity of social relationships in younger and older adults. We describe social relationships within a ‘social space’, defined as a two-dimensional grid composed of the axis ‘power’ and ‘affiliation’, and investigate it using a 3D virtual environment with interacting avatars. We show that participants remap dimensions in ‘social space’ when avatars show conflicting behavior compared to consistent behavior and that, while older adults show similar updating behavior than younger adults, they show a distinct reduction in remapping social space. Our data provide first evidence that older adults show more rigid social behavior when avatars change their behavior in the dimensions of power and affiliation, which may explain age-related social behavior differences in everyday life.

Highlights

Social relationships are a central aspect of our everyday life, yet our ability to change established social relationships is an under-investigated topic
We used virtual reality (VR) to test the following hypotheses: (i) Do participants modify the position of people in ‘social space’ dependent on the behavior of the avatar (updating versus remapping)?, (ii) Do older adults show higher affiliation towards avatars compared to younger adults?, (iii) Do older adults show less flexible behavior when social interaction partners change their behavior? Testing these hypotheses in a virtual environment allows us to gain critical insights regarding the cognitive mechanisms involved in the plasticity and rigidity of social interactions and changes in social behavior that occur with increasing age[20,21]
We first aimed at answering our first research question (i.e., Do participants modify the position of people in ‘social space’ depending on the behavior of the avatar (updating versus remapping)?) To target this question, we conducted 2 ANOVAs taking the coordinates of power and affiliation as dependent variables, with the factors condition and phase

Summary

Introduction

Social relationships are a central aspect of our everyday life, yet our ability to change established social relationships is an under-investigated topic. Human interactions are shaped by constant evaluations of the social counterpart[3,4,5] Misjudgments, such as providing too little respect towards a superior person in a social hierarchy, or showing distant behavior towards a close friend, may lead to unfavorable social behavior and related interpersonal consequences. We use the term ‘remapping’ to describe the cognitive process of altering the coordinates in ‘social space’ based on conflicting information on power and/ or affiliation (e.g., a close friend becomes your boss, a stranger becomes your friend). This allows investigating the rigidity of social behavior in a systematic and controlled way. The investigation of social remapping in older adults allows us to understand fundamental cognitive mechanisms that may underlie altered social behavior in adults

Methods

Results

Conclusion