Evidence for the role of affective theory of mind in face-name associative memory

ABSTRACT

Poor face-name recall has been associated with age-related impairments in cognitive functioning, namely declines in episodic memory and executive control. However, the role of social cognitive function – the ability to remember, process, and store information about others – has been largely overlooked in this work. Extensive work has shown that social and nonsocial cognitive processes rely on unique, albeit overlapping, mechanisms. In the current study, we explored whether social cognitive functioning – specifically the ability to infer other people’s mental states (i.e., theory of mind) – facilitates better face-name learning. To do this, a sample of 289 older and young adults completed a face-name learning paradigm along with standard assessments of episodic memory and executive control alongside two theory of mind measures, one static and one dynamic. In addition to expected age differences, several key effects emerged. Age-related differences in recognition were explained by episodic memory, not social cognition. However, age effects in recall were explained by both episodic memory and social cognition, specifically affective theory of mind in the dynamic task. Altogether, we contend that face-name recall can be supported by social cognitive functioning, namely understanding emotions. While acknowledging the influence of task characteristics (i.e., lures, target ages), we interpret these findings in light of existing accounts of age differences in face-name associative memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Face-name learning
• aging
• social memory
• theory of mind
• lures

Acknowledgments

We thank Daniel Kennedy and Kurt Hugenberg for their contributions to the construction of The Office® task and the following people for their contributions to data collection: Amy Gourley, Samuel Rincón, Sarah Nawar, and Mia Freeman. LJH developed the face-name task, conducted data analyses, and wrote the paper. ACK developed the remainder of the method, supervised data collection and analysis, and helped write and revise the paper. The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose. Data can be made available upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It should be noted that there were significant differences in education (x² = 159.4, p < .001) as many of our older adults had completed bachelor’s or advanced degrees. This is driven by recruitment of alumni and former faculty members still living in the community and surrounding area. Nevertheless, normative age differences were still evident in cognitive and social cognitive variables of interest (see Table 3) and education was unrelated to associative memory (see Table 4).

2. Familiarity significantly differed between age groups. In fact, 82% of young adults reported having seen at least one episode which was significantly more than the 36% of older adults (x² = 63.24, p < .001). However, when included in the regression analyses, this did not influence the direction or significance of any reported coefficients (ps > .10).

3. We considered consolidating predictors by calculating reliability estimates for a single cognitive and single affective composite. Inferring motivation, inferring beliefs, and detecting deception had good reliability (Cronbach’s α = .78) with interitem correlations around or above .50. However, inferring emotions and faux pas recognition were substantially less reliable (Cronbach’s α = .58) with all interitem correlations below .40, indicating insufficient shared variance for pooling. Nevertheless, a priori power analysis accounted for the five subcomponents as independent predictors, and we opted to keep these variables separate as a result.

4. The lack of age differences in the RMET is surprising. However, sociodemographic influences have been documented with more highly educated, White, and female participants performing better (see Dodell-Feder et al., 2020; Greenberg et al., 2023) which comprise a majority of our older adult sample (see Table 1 and footnote 1).

5. Statistical sensitivity may be an issue here due to range restriction. There was poor performance overall, irrespective of age group, with all but 14 participants recalling 8 or less names (i.e., 50% recall rate) with over half of the sample having recalled 4 or less (i.e., 25% recall rate). This can be seen in Figure 1.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Aging Grant R01AG070931 (PI: Krendl)