Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 32, Issue 12, Pages 1918-1936Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/09567976211017870
Keywords
theory of mind; mentalizing; executive function; aging; social cognition; open data; open materials; preregistered
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The decline in theory of mind with age may be linked to older adults' disproportionate struggles in managing conflict between cued locations, while individual differences in attention and response speed play a key role in explaining the level of conflict experienced with incompatible self-other perspectives.
Age-related decline in theory of mind (ToM) may be due to waning executive control, which is necessary for resolving conflict when reasoning about other individuals' mental states. We assessed how older (n = 50) and younger (n = 50) adults were affected by three theoretically relevant sources of conflict within ToM: competing self-other perspectives, competing cued locations, and outcome knowledge. We examined which best accounted for age-related difficulty with ToM. Our data show unexpected similarity between age groups when people are representing a belief incongruent with their own. Individual differences in attention and response speed best explained the degree of conflict experienced through incompatible self-other perspectives. However, older adults were disproportionately affected by managing conflict between cued locations. Age and spatial working memory were most relevant for predicting the magnitude of conflict elicited by conflicting cued locations. We suggest that previous studies may have underestimated older adults' ToM proficiency by including unnecessary conflict in ToM tasks.
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