Although theory of mind (ToM) has been extensively explored in aging, few studies have used the same tool to simultaneously assess and compare its cognitive and affective components. When we administered the Movie for Assessment of Social Cognition, a dynamic sequence of social scenes, to 60 healthy participants (20-75 years), we observed no different age-related decreases in both cognitive and affective ToM. While each component was associated with cognitive measures (i.e., episodic memory and processing speed were predictive of cognitive ToM, and recognition of facial emotion expressions and inhibition were predictive of affective ToM), mediation analyses showed that these measures only mediated the effect of age on affective ToM. Voxelwise regressions with grey-matter volume showed that the components partly rely on the same neural substrates, reflecting either ToM per se or other cognitive processes elicited by this multi-determinant task. We discuss the specific substrates of each ToM component, emphasising the importance of considering the impact of other aspects of cognition, present in more ecological situations, on ToM functioning.

中文翻译：

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整个成年人寿命中心理理论的神经认知决定因素。

尽管在衰老方面已经广泛地研究了心理理论（ToM），但很少有研究使用相同的工具来同时评估和比较其认知和情感成分。当我们对60名健康参与者（20-75岁）进行“社交认知评估电影”（社交场景的动态序列）时，我们发现认知和情感ToM均没有与年龄相关的下降。虽然每个组成部分都与认知措施相关（即，情节性记忆和处理速度可预测认知ToM，而面部表情和表情的识别则可预测情感ToM），但调解分析表明，这些措施仅能调节年龄对情感ToM。灰质体积的Voxelwise回归表明，这些成分部分依赖于相同的神经底物，反映ToM本身或此多决定性任务引发的其他认知过程。我们讨论每个ToM组件的特定底物，强调考虑在更生态的环境中存在的其他认知方面对ToM功能的影响的重要性。