Healey Meghan L, Grossman Murray
a Penn Frontotemporal Degeneration Center, Department of Neurology , University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Neuroscience Graduate Group, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine , Philadelphia , Pennsylvania.
Exp Aging Res. 2016;42(1):112-7. doi: 10.1080/0361073X.2015.1108691.
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.
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 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.
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.
背景/研究背景：在各种合作情境中，参与者必须采纳伙伴的视角并建立有助于促进共同理解的共享心理表征。这个过程被称为社会协调。在此，作者研究衰老对社会协调的影响，并分别考虑与视角采择和工作记忆相关的组成过程。
12名年轻成年人和14名老年人完成了一项基于语言的实验性协调任务。要求受试者详细描述一个场景，以便对话伙伴能够在其他具有不同数量共同特征的竞争物体的背景下识别目标物体。试验中伙伴可获得的信息（视角采择需求）以及场景中存在的竞争物体数量（工作记忆需求）各不相同。根据形容词的使用对回答进行评分。
结果表明社会协调能力随年龄增长而下降。年轻成年人的表现接近上限，而老年人在49.70%的试验中才表现得准确。在无竞争者的视角采择条件分析中，老年人相对于年轻成年人持续受损；在最简单视角采择条件下对竞争者数量的分析中，随着竞争者数量增加，老年人和年轻人的表现都变得更差。
实验数据表明社会协调能力随年龄增长而下降，这可能会影响沟通效果。老年人提供不充分回答的倾向表明其在视角采择方面存在局限性，并且随着竞争者数量增加共同基础表现的下降模式表明这与工作记忆衰退无关。总之，我们的结果表明衰老过程中的社会协调缺陷可能是多因素的。
