Study will look at how the brain handles social thinking as people age

The goal of this single center non-interventional fMRI and EEG study is to assess the neural bases of social cognitive processing in healthy individuals, and whether/how their responsiveness is modulated by ageing. The main questions it aims to answer are:

• are there specific brain regions where individual differences in social cognitive performance reflect well-established metrics of social cogntion such as empathy and mentalizing?
• is there a relationship, at the behavioral and neural levels, between ageing-related changes in social cognitive performance and empathy/mentalizing?

Healthy participants will be recruited for:

• a behavioral assessment including multiple tests of social cognition focused on empathy and mentalizing;
• for half participants: a fMRI session to collect data concerning a) brain activity associated with action observation and social cognitive processing, b) brain structural morphometriy (grey-matter volume/density), and c) brain structural connectivity (diffusion weighted imaging)
• for half participants: a EEG session to collect data concerning brain responsiveness to social cognitive processing with higher temporal resolution than that afforded by fMRI.

Results will provide an useful baseline for investigating alterations of social cognitive processing, and of their neural bases, in pathological conditions.