Heterogeneous factors influence social cognition across diverse settings in brain health and age-related diseases

Aging may diminish social cognition, which is crucial for interaction with others, and significant changes in this capacity can indicate pathological processes like dementia. However, the extent to which non-specific factors explain variability in social cognition performance, especially among older adults and in global settings, remains unknown. A computational approach assessed combined heterogeneous contributors to social cognition in a diverse sample of 1063 older adults from 9 countries. Support vector regressions predicted the performance in emotion recognition, mentalizing, and a total social cognition score from a combination of disparate factors, including clinical diagnosis (healthy controls, subjective cognitive complaints, mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia), demographics (sex, age, education, and country income as a proxy of socioeconomic status), cognition (cognitive and executive functions), structural brain reserve, and in-scanner motion artifacts. Cognitive and executive functions and educational level consistently emerged among the top predictors of social cognition across models. Such non-specific factors showed more substantial influence than diagnosis (dementia or cognitive decline) and brain reserve. Notably, age did not make a significant contribution when considering all predictors. While fMRI brain networks did not show predictive value, head movements significantly contributed to emotion recognition. Models explained between 28–44% of the variance in social cognition performance. Results challenge traditional interpretations of age-related decline, patient-control differences, and brain signatures of social cognition, emphasizing the role of heterogeneous factors. Findings advance our understanding of social cognition in brain health and disease, with implications for predictive models, assessments, and interventions.