Visual perspective taking in young and older adults

Advanced age is associated with difficulties in social understanding. However, little is known about the underlying cognitive processes. In the present study, healthy young and older adults completed measures of implicit and explicit visual perspective taking (VPT) and measures of executive and social cognition across four experiments. Congruency effects (slower response times or reduced accuracy when scenes were incongruent with the alternate perspective) were identified for the egocentric ("self") and allocentric ("other") conditions of both Level 1 ("line of sight") and Level 2 ("egocentric transformation") explicit VPT. Older adults showed less influence of the alternate perspective during Level 1 VPT, as indexed by fewer errors when the alternate perspective was incongruent. However, during Level 2 VPT, compared with young adults, older adults showed greater influence of the allocentric perspective during egocentric judgments as indexed by slower response times when the scene was incongruent with the allocentric perspective. Older adults were also slower at taking the allocentric perspective in general across both Level 1 and 2 tasks. An implicit VPT effect was identified that was consistent across both age groups. Several VPT measures were associated with executive and social cognition, with different patterns in young and older adults suggesting differing underlying strategies or cognitive processes may partially explain VPT differences between the groups. Difficulties in higher order social tasks may arise from underlying cognitive processes involved in perspective taking and these may be different depending on the requirement to perform an egocentric transformation into the allocentric frame of reference. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).