COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING AND SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING IN YOUNG AND OLDER ADULTHOOD

Past research sees consistent age-related declines across many measures of cognitive functioning and social understanding. As such, the present study aims to investigate the age-related links between these measures. I examined this by giving young and older adults a series of tasks relating to cognitive functioning (statistical learning, working memory, processing speed, and fluid IQ) and social understanding (emotion recognition and theory of mind [ToM]). Additionally, I gave them nine social psychology questionnaires, and a Cyberball task measuring participants’ understanding of when they were being ostracised. These measures were included to find potential links between cognitive, social understanding, and prejudice measures. Five hypotheses were established: 1. Young would outperform old on measures of cognition and social understanding, 2. Statistical learning might underlie emotion recognition in older adults, 3. Working memory underlies younger adults statistical learning, 4. Older adults will have higher RWA due to age-related declines in social understanding performance. 5. Better cognitive ability in older adults will result in better performance on the Cyberball task. Younger adults were better on all cognitive and social understanding measures, except for statistical learning. There were correlations between cognitive functions and a decline in social understanding. After controlling for cognitive decline there was still an age-related decline in social understanding. For both young and older adults, there were associations between RWA and ToM, whereby higher RWA scores correlated with poorer ToM ability. Finally, older adults’ ability to judge the number of passes they had received in the Cyberball task was correlated with a better working memory and less sensitivity to rejection. Findings from this study reveal interesting links between cognition and social understanding that future research should examine further