The cognitive mechanisms underlying perspective taking between conversational partners: Evidence from speakers with Alzheimer׳s disease

Abstract

Successful communication requires speakers to consider their listeners’ perspectives. Little is known about how this ability changes in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) although such knowledge could reveal the cognitive mechanisms fundamental to perspective-taking ability, and reveal which cognitive deficits are fundamental to communication disorders in AD. Patients with mild to moderate AD and age and education matched controls were tested in a communicative perspective-taking task, and on measures of executive control, general cognitive functioning, and lexical retrieval. Patients’ ability to perform the perspective-taking task was significantly correlated with performance on measures of general cognitive functioning, visual scanning and construction, response conflict and attention. Measures of lexical retrieval tended not to be correlated with performance on the communication task with one exception: semantic but not letter fluency predicted a derived score of perspective-taking ability. These findings broaden our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying perspective taking, and suggest that impairments in perspective taking in AD occur during utterance planning, and at a relatively early processing stage which involves rapid visual scanning and problem solving, rather than during retrieval of lexical items needed to speak. More broadly, these data reveal executive function and semantic deficits, but not problems with lexical retrieval, as more fundamental to the basis of cognitive changes associated with AD.

Social Coordination in Older Adulthood: A Dual-Process Model

“…Conditions included a “common ground” condition, where the participant and the avatar had equal access to all of the objects in a scene; a “colorblind” condition, where the participant was told that the avatar is only able to see in grayscale; and a “privileged ground” condition, where an opaque backing to the shelf physically blocked the avatar from seeing some of the objects on the shelf. The common ground and privileged ground conditions are comparable to those used in previous research on visual perspective-taking, including seminal work by Keysar and colleagues (Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000; Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003) and follow-up studies by Wardlow, Brown-Schmidt, and others (Brown-Schmidt, 2009; Wardlow, 2013; Wardlow, Ivanova, & Gollan, 2014). However, these studies generally use smaller arrays of objects that may not adequately mimic the complex and demanding nature of real-world communication.…”

Getting on the same page: The neural basis for social coordination deficits in behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration

“…Only a limited number of studies to date have examined perspective-taking in a communicative context (Dumontheil et al, 2010; Hillebrandt et al, 2013; Wardlow, 2013; Wardlow et al, 2014). For example, in an fMRI study of healthy volunteers, Dumontheil et al, (2010) used a variant of the director task, originally described by Keysar and colleagues (Keysar et al, 2000, 2003).…”

“…The paradigm in both studies, however, is comprehension-based and requires subjects to identify the target object via a motor response. Some referential communication studies in healthy adults and patients with Alzheimer’s disease (Wardlow, 2013; Wardlow et al, 2014) do involve overt speech responses, but not embedded within a discourse context. These studies also used smaller arrays of objects that may not adequately mimic the complex nature of real-world conversation.…”

“…Previous studies examining perspective-taking (Dumontheil et al, 2010; Hillebrandt et al, 2013; Wardlow, 2013; Wardlow et al, 2014) used stimuli that physically obstruct one partner’s view, much like our privileged ground condition. However, the perspective-taking required during most conversations involves not necessarily the alignment of visuospatial references, but rather the alignment of mental representations and situation models.…”

Individual differences in switching and inhibition predict perspective-taking across the lifespan

“…In children, inhibitory control is negatively correlated with communicative egocentrism (Nilsen & Graham, 2009). At the other end of the lifespan, Wardlow, Ivanova, and Gollan (2014) Here, we explore the simultaneous contributions of inhibition and switching to performance in a conversational perspective--taking task. Interestingly, these EF capacities are associated with two semi--independent (yet possibly concurrently engaged) modes of cognitive control.…”