Prior research has shown that older adults perform more poorly than young on tasks that assess theory of mind (ToM). However, these studies have used tasks that are performed "offline" (i.e., requiring a second-person perspective) as opposed to "online" (i.e., requiring a first-person perspective). Therefore, the present study was designed to establish whether age-related ToM difficulties are also evident when an "online" measure of ToM is used. Forty younger and 40 older adults completed the Virtual Assessment of Mentalizing Ability (VAMA) along with two conventional ToM tasks. No age differences were evident on the conventional measures, but older adults had lower accuracy on the VAMA relative to their younger counterparts. The overall pattern of errors did not differ between the groups. These data provide no evidence that age effects are reduced when stimuli are used that are more likely to engage the mentalizing processes elicited in real life social interactions.

中文翻译：

---

使用心理化能力的虚拟评估对心理理论中的年龄差异进行评估。

先前的研究表明，老年人在评估心理理论 (ToM) 的任务上的表现比年轻人差。然而，这些研究使用了“离线”（即需要第二人称视角）而不是“在线”（即需要第一人称视角）执行的任务。因此，本研究旨在确定当使用“在线”ToM 测量时，与年龄相关的 ToM 困难是否也很明显。40 名年轻人和 40 名老年人完成了心理能力虚拟评估 (VAMA) 以及两项传统的 ToM 任务。在常规测量中没有明显的年龄差异，但相对于年轻的同龄人，老年人在 VAMA 上的准确度较低。各组之间的总体错误模式没有差异。