ArticleThe journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences2023
Determining Whether Older Adults Use Similar Strategies to Young Adults in Theory of Mind Tasks.
Article in The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Disentangling the role of executive function and episodic memory in older adults' performance on dynamic theory of mind tasks.Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition · 2025Article
- Functional reconfiguration between rest and movie watching relates to theory-of-mind performance among young and older adults.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Mindsets over matter: priming theory of mind improves older adults' mental state attributions about naturalistic social interactions.Aging & mental health · 2025Observational
- Dissociable brain activity for high-stakes deception detection in young and older adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Age Differences in Mental State Inference of Sarcasm: Contributions of Facial Emotion Recognition and Cognitive Performance.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2024Article
- Establishing construct validity for dynamic measures of behavior using naturalistic study designs.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Social and general cognition are uniquely associated with social connectedness in later life.Psychology and aging · 2024Article
- Evidence for the role of affective theory of mind in face-name associative memory.Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition · 2024Article
- New directions for studying the aging social-cognitive brain.Current opinion in psychology · 2024Review
- Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Muscular Strength Do Not Predict Social Cognitive Capacity in Older Age.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
objectivesTheory of mind-the ability to infer others' mental states-declines over the life span, potentially due to cognitive decline. However, it is unclear whether deficits emerge because older adults use the same strategies as young adults, albeit less effectively, or use different or no strategies. The current study compared the similarity of older adults' theory of mind errors to young adults' and a random model.
methodsOne hundred twenty older adults (MAge = 74.68 years; 64 female) and 111 young adults (MAge = 19.1; 61 female) completed a novel theory of mind task (clips from an episode of the sitcom The Office®), and a standard measure of cognitive function (Logical Memory II). Monte Carlo resampling estimated the likelihood that older adults' error patterns were more similar to young adults' or a random distribution.
resultsAge deficits emerged on the theory of mind task. Poorer performance was associated with less similarity to young adults' response patterns. Overall, older adults' response patterns were ~2.7 million times more likely to match young adults' than a random model. Critically, one fourth of older adults' errors were more similar to the random distribution. Poorer memory ability contributed to this relationship. DISCUSSION: Age deficits in theory of mind performance may be driven by a subset of older adults and be related to disparities in strategy use. A certain amount of cognitive ability may be necessary for older adults to engage similar strategies to young adults' during theory of mind.
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