Social Cognitive Changes With Age: How efficiency of considering the ‘self’ and ‘other’ perspectives changes across the lifespan

Description

Social cognition plays an integral part of our daily lives; whether communicating with a friend or stranger, we are constantly using our social cognitive abilities to compute and evaluate mental states of both ourselves and our interactive partners. The current study examined how consideration of ‘self’ and ‘other’ perspectives – and the ability to switch between these two perspectives – changes across the lifespan. A large (N = 312) continuous age sample of community based participants, aged 10-86 years, completed a false-belief task, assessing how efficiently they could attribute belief states to themselves and other people. A sub-sample of participants (N = 139) returned ~two years later to examine potential changes in perspective-taking and perspective-shifting abilities across time. Results revealed increased egocentric processing with advancing age, although there was no change in perspective-shifting efficiency as a consequence of age. Longitudinal data supported stable perspective-shifting abilities within individuals across two time points.

Period	2022
Event title	Psychonomics Society Annual Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Boston, United StatesShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International