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AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THEORY OF MIND: A TIME-VARYING FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY APPROACH

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the act of inferring someone’s inner state, such as their emotions and thoughts. Previous work also demonstrated that ToM performance declines across age, but the mechanisms underlying this are not well-understood. The brain regions underlying ToM are generally in the...

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Autores principales: Rincon, Samuel Naranjo, Betzel, Richard, Krendl, Anne
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9771047/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igac059.2080
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author Rincon, Samuel Naranjo
Betzel, Richard
Krendl, Anne
author_facet Rincon, Samuel Naranjo
Betzel, Richard
Krendl, Anne
author_sort Rincon, Samuel Naranjo
collection PubMed
description Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the act of inferring someone’s inner state, such as their emotions and thoughts. Previous work also demonstrated that ToM performance declines across age, but the mechanisms underlying this are not well-understood. The brain regions underlying ToM are generally in the default mode network (DMN) – a group of brain regions particularly vulnerable to pathological aging. Recent work suggests that declines in functional connectivity (FC; correlations between brain regions) during resting state (a period of undirected thought) predict age deficits in ToM. However, these findings come from aggregated FC, ignoring potentially informative details of dynamic changes during resting state. Researching these details may provide more specificity related to social cognitive aging. To test this, 35 older adults (OA; M = 75.61; 22 female) and 40 young adults (YA; M = 21.58; 25 female) underwent resting state and task-based fMRI. During the task, they completed a standard ToM task. We conducted time-varying functional connectivity analyses in the DMN to identify dynamic changes over time. Overall, OA had more variability than YA, but variability benefitted YAs, and not OAs. This occurred specifically in a DMN subnetwork associated with contextual information in memory. These results suggest that variability is useful, but only to an extent. With respect to ToM, variability may promote how YA integrate contextual information to memory, but is ineffective for OA.
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spelling pubmed-97710472023-01-24 AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THEORY OF MIND: A TIME-VARYING FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY APPROACH Rincon, Samuel Naranjo Betzel, Richard Krendl, Anne Innov Aging Abstracts Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the act of inferring someone’s inner state, such as their emotions and thoughts. Previous work also demonstrated that ToM performance declines across age, but the mechanisms underlying this are not well-understood. The brain regions underlying ToM are generally in the default mode network (DMN) – a group of brain regions particularly vulnerable to pathological aging. Recent work suggests that declines in functional connectivity (FC; correlations between brain regions) during resting state (a period of undirected thought) predict age deficits in ToM. However, these findings come from aggregated FC, ignoring potentially informative details of dynamic changes during resting state. Researching these details may provide more specificity related to social cognitive aging. To test this, 35 older adults (OA; M = 75.61; 22 female) and 40 young adults (YA; M = 21.58; 25 female) underwent resting state and task-based fMRI. During the task, they completed a standard ToM task. We conducted time-varying functional connectivity analyses in the DMN to identify dynamic changes over time. Overall, OA had more variability than YA, but variability benefitted YAs, and not OAs. This occurred specifically in a DMN subnetwork associated with contextual information in memory. These results suggest that variability is useful, but only to an extent. With respect to ToM, variability may promote how YA integrate contextual information to memory, but is ineffective for OA. Oxford University Press 2022-12-20 /pmc/articles/PMC9771047/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igac059.2080 Text en © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Abstracts
Rincon, Samuel Naranjo
Betzel, Richard
Krendl, Anne
AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THEORY OF MIND: A TIME-VARYING FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY APPROACH
title AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THEORY OF MIND: A TIME-VARYING FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY APPROACH
title_full AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THEORY OF MIND: A TIME-VARYING FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY APPROACH
title_fullStr AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THEORY OF MIND: A TIME-VARYING FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY APPROACH
title_full_unstemmed AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THEORY OF MIND: A TIME-VARYING FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY APPROACH
title_short AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN THEORY OF MIND: A TIME-VARYING FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY APPROACH
title_sort age-related differences in theory of mind: a time-varying functional connectivity approach
topic Abstracts
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9771047/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igac059.2080
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