Abstract
Healthy ageing is associated with declining social understanding and communication abilities, which likely exacerbate the social difficulties associated with isolation. This project will examine the extent to which perceptual difficulties can explain these problems. If older adults cannot perceive the subtleties of others’ facial expressions, movements and speech, they will be unable to use these cues for effective understanding and communication. The project will obtain psychophysical and neural measures of perceptual processing and social categorisations (electroencephalography with transcranial magnetic stimulation), and use linear support vector machines and drift diffusion modelling to determine perceptual contributions to social decline.
References
1. Happé, F. G., Cook. J.L., & Bird, G. (2017). The structure of social cognition: In(ter)dependence of sociocognitive processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 243-267.
2. Shankar, A., McMunn, A., Banks, J., & Steptoe, A. (2011). Loneliness, social isolation, and behavioral and biological health indicators in older adults. Health Psychology, 30, 377-385.
3. Luo, Y., Hawkley, L. C., Waite, L. J., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2012). Loneliness, health, and mortality in old age: A national longitudinal study. Social Science & Medicine, 74, 907-914.
4. Elliott, S. L., Choi, S. S., Doble, N., Hardy, J. L., Evans, J. W., & Werner, J. S. (2009). Role of high-order aberrations in senescent changes in spatial vision. Journal of Vision, 9, 1-16.
5. Parikh, R. S., Parikh, S. R., Sekhar, G. C., Prabakaran, S., Babu, J. G., & Thomas, R. (2007). Normal age-related decay of retinal nerve fiber layer thickness. Ophthalmology, 114, 921-926.
6. Brewer, A. A., & Barton, B. (2014). Visual cortex in aging and Alzheimer’s disease: changes in visual field maps and population receptive fields. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 74.
7. Coll, M.P., Bird, G., Catmur, C., & Press, C. (2015). Cross-modal repetition effects in the mu rhythm indicate tactile mirroring during action observation. Cortex, 63, 121-131.
8. Coll, M.P. Press, C., Hobson, H., Catmur, C., & Bird, G. (2017). Crossmodal classification of muy rhythm activity during action observation and execution suggests specificity to somatosensory features of actions. Journal of Neuroscience, 37, 5936-5947.
9. Catmur, C., Walsh, V., & Heyes, C. (2007). Sensorimotor learning configures the human mirror system. Current Biology, 17. 1527-1531.
10. Ruffman, T., Henry, J. D., Livingstone, V., & Phillips, L. H. (2008). A meta-analytic review of emotion recognition and aging: Implications for neuropsychological models of aging. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 32, 863-881.
11. Kingdom, F. A. A., & Prins, N. (2010). Psychophysics: a practical introduction. London, UK: Elsevier.
12. Smith, P.L., & Ratcliff, R. (2009). An integrated theory of attention and decision making in visual signal detection. Psychological Review, 116, 283-317.