Social Coordination in Older Adulthood: A Dual-Process Model

Abstract

Background/Study Context In a variety of collaborative circumstances, participants must adopt the perspective of a partner and establish a shared mental representation that helps mediate common understanding. This process is referred to as social coordination. Here, the authors investigate the effect of aging on social coordination and consider separately the component processes related to perspective-taking and working memory. Methods Twelve young adults and 14 older adults completed an experimental, language-based coordination task. Subjects were asked to describe a scene with sufficient detail so that a conversational partner could identify a target object in the context of other, competing objects that shared a variable number of features. Trials varied in the information available to the partner (perspective-taking demand) and in the number of competing objects present in the scene (working memory demand). Responses were scored according to adjective use. Results Results indicated that social coordination performance decreases with age. Whereas young adults performed close to ceiling, older adults were only precise in 49.70% of trials. In analyses examining perspective-taking conditions with no competitors, older adults were consistently impaired relative to young adults; in analyses examining the number of competitors during the simplest perspective-taking condition, both older and younger adults became more impaired with increasing numbers of competitors. Conclusion The experimental data suggest that social coordination decreases with age, which may affect communicative efficacy. Older adults’ tendency to provide insufficient responses suggests a limitation in perspective-taking, and the pattern of decline in common ground performance with increasing competitors suggests that this is independent of working memory decline. In sum, our results suggest that social coordination deficits in aging may be multifactorial.

The pressure to communicate efficiently continues to shape language use later in life

“…On the other hand, the ageing brain is capable of remarkable plasticity, which may make older adults (with a lifetime of language experience) better equipped to adopt effective production strategies based on available cognitive resources 37,38,39,40 . Recent work suggests that individual differences in response to ageing may account for divergent linguistic outcomes: While some older adults are indistinguishable from younger adults in perspective-taking 11 , fluency 41,42 , and ambiguity avoidance 43 , others display marked decline in the same areas 44,33,6 .…”

Age-related differences in multimodal recipient design: younger, but not older adults, adapt speech and co-speech gestures to common ground

“…We additionally aimed to investigate the impact of cognitive abilities on recipient design in speech, expecting that older adults' lower verbal working memory and lower executive control would be associated with a smaller reduction in words and narrative elements (based on the work by e.g. Healey & Grossman, 2016;Horton & Gerrig, 2005;Hupet et al, 1993;Long et al, 2018;Wardlow, 2013).…”

“…Based on previous research (e.g. Healey & Grossman, 2016;Horton & Spieler, 2007;Hupet et al, 1993;Long et al, 2018;Wardlow, 2013), we had hypothesised that verbal WM and executive control influence the ability to engage in recipient design. Deficits in verbal WM may limit the extent to which speakers can focus their resources on considering which information is or is not mutually shared when designing their utterances, and on adapting the utterances accordingly.…”

“…The role of cognitive abilities in verbal recipient design Horton and Spieler (2007) suggest that older adults' inferior performance on these referential communication tasks may be due to age-related cognitive limitations, specifically difficulties in retrieving partner-specific information from memory (see also Horton & Gerrig, 2005). Additionally, there are indications that working memory may play a role in recipient design: Work on visual perspective-taking abilities in younger (Wardlow, 2013) and older adults (Healey & Grossman, 2016) suggests that working memory plays a significant role when speakers are required to take an addressee's visual perspective into account while formulating their utterances. Older adults perform more poorly on these tasks.…”

Introduction to Special Issue on Age, Hearing, and Speech Comprehension

“…Studies of patients with aphasia or neurodegenerative disease are complemented by evidence from functional neuroimaging Vaden et al, 2016) and provide the opportunity to incorporate neuroanatomical constraints into models for language processing. Finally, to move from laboratory-based language to something more closely resembling everyday communication, we need to understand speech at multiple levels of linguistic complexity, including discourse-level material (Stine-Morrow & Payne, 2016;Ward, Rogers, Van Engen, & Peelle, 2016) and the complex cognitive demands of interpersonal communication (Healey & Grossman, 2016). Space prevents anything more than a cursory treatment of these subjects-and many are not included-but the articles here can help to paint an outline for the diversity of topics to which speech comprehension is linked.…”