Social cognition in adults: the role of cognitive control

This study aimed at examining the direct and indirect, via cognitive control and emotion recognition, effects of advancing age on adults' social cognition, and especially, on complex forms of it such as indirect speech, faux pas, and social mental verb understanding.

The sample comprised a total of 70 adults, aged from 18 to 83 years. Participants were almost equally distributed in each one of three age-groups (young, middle-aged, and older adults), according to their gender and educational level. Three tasks measuring the ability to interpret indirect speech, the ability to understand faux pas, and social mental verb understanding, respectively, were administered as measures of social cognition. Cognitive control, as inhibitory control, task switching, updating-monitoring, and planning, as well as basic emotion decoding from visual cues, were measured by four and one task respectively.

After the confirmation of the factor structure of each one of the dimensions of social cognition, and the examination of the direct effects of age on them, the all-inclusive path model finally confirmed showed that age has a significant negative indirect effect, via cognitive control, on social cognition as ability to interpret indirect speech and faux pas.

The decreased performance that cognitively healthy older adults exhibit, as regards specific complex dimensions of social cognition, could be attributed to negative effects of age on cognitive control. However, it is likely that some other complex dimensions of social cognition are not affected by frontal aging.