General cognitive decline does not account for older adults’ worse emotion recognition and theory of mind

Abstract

Older adults have both worse general cognition and worse social cognition. A frequent suggestion is that worse social cognition is due to worse general cognition. However, previous studies have often provided contradictory evidence. The current study examined this issue with a more extensive battery of tasks for both forms of cognition. We gave 47 young and 40 older adults three tasks to assess general cognition (processing speed, working memory, fluid intelligence) and three tasks to assess their social cognition (emotion and theory-of-mind). Older adults did worse on all tasks and there were correlations between general and social cognition. Although working memory and fluid intelligence were unique predictors of performance on the Emotion Photos task and the Eyes task, Age Group was a unique predictor on all three social cognition tasks. Thus, there were relations between the two forms of cognition but older adults continued to do worse than young adults even after accounting for general cognition. We argue that this pattern of results is due to some overlap in brain areas mediating general and social cognition, but also independence, and with a differential rate of decline in brain areas dedicated to general cognition versus social cognition.

Aging Is Associated With Multidirectional Changes in Social Cognition: Findings From an Adult Life-Span Sample Ranging From 18 to 101 Years

“…Importantly though, age was consistently the strongest independent predictor of all four social cognitive domains when broader cognition was accounted for. These findings add to a growing literature showing that changes in broader cognitive function contribute to social cognitive aging but are not the sole factor responsible for the observed age effects ( Kong et al, 2022 ; Orgeta & Phillips, 2008 ; Phillips et al, 2011 ).…”

“…While the role of broader cognitive function in social cognitive capacity has been examined previously, the findings have been quite mixed. Some studies have shown that performance on certain cognitive domains accounts for at least some of the age variance in social cognition ( Charlton et al, 2009 ; Kong et al, 2022 ; Phillips et al, 2011 ; Rakoczy et al, 2012 ), but others have shown that age-related social cognitive difficulties can also occur quite independently of broader cognitive losses ( Bernstein et al, 2011 ; Cavallini et al, 2013 ). Given these mixed findings, our second aim was to examine the extent to which broader cognitive function accounts for age-related variance in each of the social cognitive domains.…”

Recognition of facial emotions across the lifespan: 8‐year‐olds resemble older adults

“…Older adults were worse than young adults at all durations although, contrary to the expectation from reduced processing speed, the magnitude of difference did not vary across presentation times. Likewise, Kong et al (2022) found that older adults' emotion recognition difficulties persist even after accounting for a combination of processing speed, working memory and fluid intelligence. These studies suggest that emotion recognition, even with brief durations, might be mainly independent of general cognitive decline.…”

Brain gray matter morphometry relates to onset age of bilingualism and theory of mind in young and older adults

“…On one hand, it hinted that a positive effect of early L2AoA on ToM performance can occur independently of broader cognitive differences with age, consistent with past studies that failed to support the cognitive account of bilingual ToM advantage in both children and young adults 52,127 . On the other hand, it remains likely that ToM still benefited from bilingualism through its partial neural and computational overlaps with domain-general cognitive control [128][129][130] , which requires further investigations 71 . Equally important is our finding that L2AoA was among one of the bilingual experiences that may influence ToM and its putative structural reserve.…”