| Abstract/Results: | ABSTRACT:
Older adults are at increased risk of cognitive deficits and neurological disease, but, paradoxically, they show preserved or even improved performance in emotional processing, in comparison with younger adults. These age-related changes likely shape social cognition and decision-making, but the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying these domains remain poorly understood during aging.
The present research aimed to analyze age-related changes in behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of social cognition and decision-making, as well as the role that cognitive functioning has in these domains. To this purpose, a sample of 30 younger, 30 middle-aged and 29 older adults performed a set of experimental tasks designed to examine five domains of social cognition and decision-making, during EEG recordings. These tasks assessed: (1) emotional identification; (2) theory of mind; (3) social perception; (4) decisionmaking under risk and (5) social decision-making.
Results showed that aging affects some domains of social cognition, preserving others. Specifically, aging appears to preserve emotional identification abilities, which can be mediated by an increased neural processing of the structural and emotional features of the face. However, aging appears to affect emotional perspective-taking abilities, which are fundamental to a preserved theory of mind. Older adults were also less accurate than younger adults at identifying the intentionality of social transgressions, which was found along with a N2 attenuation during the perception of accidental/intentional harms. During decision-making under risk, older adults were less risk-averse than younger adults, preferring smaller losses associated with higher probabilities of losing. Regarding electrophysiological results, middle-aged and older adults had similar amplitudes of the
feedback-related negativity after losses and non-losses, while younger adults had higher amplitudes after non-losses than after losses. Similarly, the amplitudes of the older adults’ feedback-P3 did not differ between gains and non-gains, while younger and middle-aged adults had higher feedback-P3 after gains than after non-gains. Taken together, these results suggest that aging is accompanied by a decline in the ability to adjust economic decisions according to the feedback, which may underlie older adults’ preference for risk-taking. In the last task, older adults showed the best economic strategy, assessed through the Ultimatum Game. However, such strategy may be related with an age-related decline in the neural responses to unfair offers, as shown by similar amplitudes of the medial frontal negativity component after fair and unfair offers.
Interestingly, middle-aged adults were at an intermediate level between younger and older adults in all tasks, both in neural asin behavioral responses to social cues. This suggests that aging effects on social cognition start earlier in adult development, similarly to what happens to several neurocognitive processes. With the exception of emotional identification, working memory and executive functions were correlated with social and decisional abilities. This finding is in accordance with previous results, which showed that neurocognition and social cognition are different, but related constructs.
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