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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 23, 2026

Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing

Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing

Published on: January 24, 2020

Social-cognitive deficits in normal aging.

Joseph M Moran¹, Eshin Jolly, Jason P Mitchell

¹Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. jmoran@wjh.harvard.edu

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|April 20, 2012

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Older adults show deficits in understanding others' mental states, a process called mentalizing. This is linked to reduced brain activity in the default network, specifically the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Psychology
Social Cognition

Background:

The default network, including medial prefrontal and parietal cortices, is implicated in mentalizing (inferring others' mental states).
Default network function declines with age, suggesting potential impairments in social cognition for older adults.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate age-related differences in mentalizing abilities.
To examine the neural correlates of these age-related changes in social cognition.

Main Methods:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan older and younger adults.
Participants completed three social-cognitive tasks: animated shapes, moral action stories, and false belief stories.

Main Results:

Older adults were less accurate in understanding false beliefs and using intentions for moral judgments.
Age-related decreases in the Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD) response were observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex across all tasks.

Conclusions:

Specific, task-independent age-related deficits in mentalizing exist.
These deficits are associated with changes in specific subregions of the default network, particularly the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.