Age-related changes to the neural correlates of social evaluation

Recent work suggests the existence of a specialized neural system underlying social processing that may be relatively spared with age, unlike pervasive aging-related decline occurring in many cognitive domains. We investigated how neural mechanisms underlying social evaluation are engaged with age, and how age-related changes to socioemotional goals affect recruitment of regions within this network. In a functional MRI study, 15 young and 15 older adults formed behavior-based impressions of individuals. They also responded to a prompt that was interpersonally meaningful, social but interpersonally irrelevant, or non-social. Both age groups engaged regions implicated in mentalizing and impression formation when making social relative to non-social evaluations, including dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal cortices, precuneus, and temporoparietal junction. Older adults had increased activation over young in right temporal pole when making social relative to non-social evaluations, suggesting reliance on past experiences when evaluating others. Young adults had greater activation than old in posterior cingulate gyrus when making interpersonally irrelevant, compared to interpersonally meaningful, evaluations, potentially reflecting enhanced valuation of this information. The findings demonstrate the age-related preservation of the neural correlates underlying social evaluation, and suggest that functioning in these regions might be mediated by age-related changes in socioemotional goals.