Social Coordination in Older Adulthood: A Dual-Process Model.

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: In a variety of collaborative circumstances, participants must adopt the perspective of a partner and establish a shared mental representation that helps mediate common understanding. This process is referred to as social coordination. Here, the authors investigate the effect of aging on social coordination and consider separately the component processes related to perspective-taking and working memory. METHODS: Twelve young adults and 14 older adults completed an experimental, language-based coordination task. Subjects were asked to describe a scene with sufficient detail so that a conversational partner could identify a target object in the context of other, competing objects that shared a variable number of features. Trials varied in the information available to the partner (perspective-taking demand) and in the number of competing objects present in the scene (working memory demand). Responses were scored according to adjective use. RESULTS: Results indicated that social coordination performance decreases with age. Whereas young adults performed close to ceiling, older adults were only precise in 49.70% of trials. In analyses examining perspective-taking conditions with no competitors, older adults were consistently impaired relative to young adults; in analyses examining the number of competitors during the simplest perspective-taking condition, both older and younger adults became more impaired with increasing numbers of competitors. CONCLUSION: The experimental data suggest that social coordination decreases with age, which may affect communicative efficacy. Older adults' tendency to provide insufficient responses suggests a limitation in perspective-taking, and the pattern of decline in common ground performance with increasing competitors suggests that this is independent of working memory decline. In sum, our results suggest that social coordination deficits in aging may be multifactorial.

Brain activity and connectivity during poetry composition: Toward a multidimensional model of the creative process.

Creativity, a multifaceted construct, can be studied in various ways, for example, investigating phases of the creative process, quality of the creative product, or the impact of expertise. Previous neuroimaging studies have assessed these individually. Believing that each of these interacting features must be examined simultaneously to develop a comprehensive understanding of creative behavior, we examined poetry composition, assessing process, product, and expertise in a single experiment. Distinct activation patterns were associated with generation and revision, two major phases of the creative process. Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) was active during both phases, yet responses in dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal executive systems (DLPFC/IPS) were phase-dependent, indicating that while motivation remains unchanged, cognitive control is attenuated during generation and re-engaged during revision. Experts showed significantly stronger deactivation of DLPFC/IPS during generation, suggesting that they may more effectively suspend cognitive control. Importantly however, similar overall patterns were observed in both groups, indicating the same cognitive resources are available to experts and novices alike. Quality of poetry, assessed by an independent panel, was associated with divergent connectivity patterns in experts and novices, centered upon MPFC (for technical facility) and DLPFC/IPS (for innovation), suggesting a mechanism by which experts produce higher quality poetry. Crucially, each of these three key features can be understood in the context of a single neurocognitive model characterized by dynamic interactions between medial prefrontal areas regulating motivation, dorsolateral prefrontal, and parietal areas regulating cognitive control and the association of these regions with language, sensorimotor, limbic, and subcortical areas distributed throughout the brain.

Cognitive and Affective Perspective-Taking: Evidence for Shared and Dissociable Anatomical Substrates.

Perspective-taking refers to the ability to recognize another person's point of view. Crucial to the development of interpersonal relationships and prosocial behavior, perspective-taking is closely linked to human empathy, and like empathy, perspective-taking is commonly subdivided into cognitive and affective components. While the two components of empathy have been frequently compared, the differences between cognitive and affective perspective-taking have been under-investigated in the cognitive neuroscience literature to date. Here, we define cognitive perspective-taking as the ability to infer an agent's thoughts or beliefs, and affective perspective-taking as the ability to infer an agent's feelings or emotions. In this paper, we review data from functional imaging studies in healthy adults as well as behavioral and structural imaging studies in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia in order to determine if there are distinct neural correlates for cognitive and affective perspective-taking. Data suggest that there are both shared and non-shared cognitive and anatomic substrates. For example, while both types of perspective-taking engage regions such as the temporoparietal junction, precuneus, and temporal poles, only affective perspective-taking engages regions within the limbic system and basal ganglia. Differences are also observed in prefrontal cortex: while affective perspective-taking engages ventromedial prefrontal cortex, cognitive perspective-taking engages dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). To corroborate these findings, we also examine if cognitive and affective perspective-taking share the same relationship with executive functions. While it is clear that affective perspective-taking requires emotional substrates that are less prominent in cognitive perspective-taking, it remains unknown to what extent executive functions (including working memory, mental set switching, and inhibitory control) may contribute to each process. Overall results indicate that cognitive perspective-taking is dependent on executive functioning (particularly mental set switching), while affective perspective-taking is less so. We conclude with a critique of the current literature, with a focus on the different outcome measures used across studies and misconceptions due to imprecise terminology, as well as recommendations for future research.

Getting on the same page: the neural basis for social coordination deficits in behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration.

For social interactions to be successful, individuals must establish shared mental representations that allow them to reach a common understanding and "get on the same page". We refer to this process as social coordination. While examples of social coordination are ubiquitous in daily life, relatively little is known about the neuroanatomic basis of this complex behavior. This is particularly true in a language context, as previous studies have used overly complex paradigms to study this. Although traditional views of language processing and the recent interactive-alignment account of conversation focus on peri-Sylvian regions, our model of social coordination predicts prefrontal involvement. To test this hypothesis, we examine the neural basis of social coordination during conversational exchanges in non-aphasic patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration (bvFTD). bvFTD patients show impairments in executive function and social comportment due to disease in frontal and anterior temporal regions. To investigate social coordination in bvFTD, we developed a novel language-based task that assesses patients' ability to convey an object's description to a conversational partner. Experimental conditions manipulated the amount of information shared by the participant and the conversational partner, and the associated working memory demands. Our results indicate that, although patients did not have difficulty identifying the features of the objects, they did produce descriptions that included insufficient or inappropriate adjectives and thus struggled to communicate effectively. Impaired performance was related to gray matter atrophy particularly in medial prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices. Our findings suggest an important role for non-language brain areas that belong to a large-scale neurocognitive network for social coordination.