A vital part of successful everyday social interaction is the ability to update our current knowledge using information about others (e.g. their emotions, visual perspective, and language). Indeed, the need to infer meaning during interaction with others arises not just everyday, but every time we encounter another person. It is something that as healthy adults, we perform frequently and seemingly without a great deal of difficulty. However, previous research has highlighted that even healthy adults experience difficulties considering another person’s point of view when that view conflicts with their own. Further, research on healthy aging reports specific impairments in these abilities with increasing age, which raises three important questions: what is the cognitive basis of social interaction, how does this change across the life-span, and can training these underlying cognitive skills enhance impaired social skills?
Typically, children develop the necessary skills for social communication between the ages of 2 and 7 years old. A key component of this developmental trajectory is the ability to understand and predict events in terms of other peoples’ mental states, such as their intentions, beliefs and desires (termed Theory of Mind, ToM). Interestingly, this marked improvement in ToM coincides with children’s development of more general cognitive skills, called Executive Functions (EF). EF is a commonly used ‘umbrella term’ to describe the processes that are responsible for higher-level action control (e.g. planning, inhibition, coordination and control of behaviours), and are necessary to maintain specific goals and resist distraction from alternatives. Linking ToM and EF makes sense given that successful social cognition requires one to hold in mind multiple perspectives (i.e. working memory), suppress irrelevant perspectives (i.e. inhibitory control), and switch between these two perspectives depending on context (i.e. cognitive flexibility). The key aim of the CogSoCoAGE project was to systematically explore the cognitive basis of social communication and how this changes across the life-span.
The project is organised into three complementary objectives. Objective 1 explored the degree to which variations in ToM ability across the life-span (10-90 years old) can be accounted for by changes in EF skills. Objective 2 used a longitudinal approach (i.e. test-retest of the same participants) to track the changes in ToM ability and EF skill over time in different age groups in order to establish when key developmental changes occur, while limiting the effects of individual differences between participants. Objective 3 tested whether ToM ability, and hence social interaction, can be enhanced by training specific EF skills, and how these training effects might differ across the life-span. The research within each of these objectives employed cutting-edge combinations of techniques (e.g. eye-tracking and EEG) and paradigms to assess several key components of social interaction, including emotional states, visual perspective-taking, and high-level inferences about others’ minds. We also gained a unique and significantly richer understanding of these processes by examining emerging findings alongside a battery of measures that test general social and cognitive skills (eg. IQ, language), which have enabled fine-grained analyses within and between individuals.
