Abstract：
Evidence has shown that older adults have lower accuracy in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks compared with young adults, but we are still unclear whether the difficulty in decoding mental states in older adults stems from not looking at the critical areas, and more so from the ageing Asian population. Most ToM studies use static images or short vignettes to measure ToM but these stimuli are dissimilar to everyday social interactions. We investigated this question using a dynamic task that measured both accuracy and error types, and examined the links between accuracy and error types to eye gaze fixation at critical areas (e.g., eyes, mouth, body). A total of 82 participants (38 older, 44 young adults) completed the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) task on the eye tracker. Results showed that older adults had a lower overall accuracy with more errors in the ipo-ToM (under-mentalising) and no-ToM (lack of mentalisation) conditions compared with young adults. We analysed the eye gaze data using principal components analysis and found that increasing age and looking less at the face were related to lower MASC accuracy in our participants. Our findings suggest that ageing deficits in ToM are linked to a visual attention deficit specific to the perception of socially relevant nonverbal cues.
摘要：
证据表明，与年轻人相比，老年人在心理理论（ToM）任务中的准确性较低，但是我们仍然不清楚，在老年人中解码精神状态的困难是否源于不关注关键领域，更多来自亚洲人口老龄化。大多数ToM研究使用静态图像或短插图来测量ToM，但这些刺激与日常社交互动不同。我们使用动态任务来研究这个问题，该任务测量了准确性和错误类型，并检查了准确性和错误类型与关键区域的眼睛凝视之间的联系(例如，嘴，身体)。共有82名参与者（38岁以上，44名年轻人）在眼动仪上完成了“社会认知评估电影”任务。结果显示，与年轻人相比，老年人的整体准确性较低，ipo-ToM（精神不足）和no-ToM（缺乏精神）条件的错误更多。我们使用主成分分析分析了眼睛凝视数据，发现年龄的增加和对面部的观察与参与者的MASC准确性降低有关。我们的发现表明，ToM的衰老缺陷与特定于社会相关非语言线索感知的视觉注意力缺陷有关。
