TY  - JOUR
AU  - Oltmer, Jan
AU  - Wolbers, Thomas
AU  - Kuehn, Esther
TI  - Impaired remapping of social relationships in older adults.
JO  - Scientific reports
VL  - 11
IS  - 1
SN  - 2045-2322
CY  - [London]
PB  - Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
M1  - DZNE-2021-01333
SP  - 21910
PY  - 2021
N1  - CC BY
AB  - Social relationships are a central aspect of our everyday life, yet our ability to change established social relationships is an under-investigated topic. Here, we use the concept of cognitive mapping to investigate the plasticity of social relationships in younger and older adults. We describe social relationships within a 'social space', defined as a two-dimensional grid composed of the axis 'power' and 'affiliation', and investigate it using a 3D virtual environment with interacting avatars. We show that participants remap dimensions in 'social space' when avatars show conflicting behavior compared to consistent behavior and that, while older adults show similar updating behavior than younger adults, they show a distinct reduction in remapping social space. Our data provide first evidence that older adults show more rigid social behavior when avatars change their behavior in the dimensions of power and affiliation, which may explain age-related social behavior differences in everyday life.
KW  - Aged
KW  - Female
KW  - Humans
KW  - Interpersonal Relations
KW  - Male
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:34753971
C2  - pmc:PMC8578667
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s41598-021-01258-7
UR  - https://pub.dzne.de/record/162637
ER  -