An EEG study examining how ageing influences false-belief reasoning abilities.

The ability to understand other people’s mental states – beliefs, desires, knowledge – plays a key role in everyday life, allowing individuals to engage in successful interactions and to communicate successfully. It has previously been shown that social-cognitive abilities such as these can decline with age, even in healthy individuals. The research presented here assessed potential differences in the neural basis of social-cognition abilities across the lifespan, exploring whether differentiations in belief-processing continue across the lifespan, or whether differentiations are reduced as social-cognitive abilities decline with healthy ageing. EEG measures were taken whilst participants (aged 18 – 80+ years) listened to a series of short stories in which a character held a true or false belief about the location of an object. The character was then described as acting in a manner consistent or inconsistent with this belief-state (i.e. the location they looked in for an object). Analysis using event-related potentials demonstrated that for both younger and older adults, there was a significant difference in how true and false-belief states were processed, with a significant role of belief-consistent versus belief-inconsistent actions of the character. When the character was in possession of a false-belief, belief-consistent outcomes led to a more negative-going N400 component than belief-inconsistent outcomes. Whilst following similar patterns, these distinctions were more pronounced in the older adult group than the younger adult group. Results indicate potential differences in the processes underlying belief-state reasoning across the lifespan.