Social Cognition Assessment in Older Individuals with and without Cognitive Impairment
Social cognition refers to our ability to understand social information from our environment and adapt our behavior accordingly. Social cognition assessment is important because deficits in social cognition can be a sign of neurological pathologies, such as frontotemporal dementia (FTD), primary progressive aphasia (PPA), or Alzheimer’s type dementia (ATD). However, there is no validated or normed social cognition test for the elderly French-speaking Canadian population. Emotion recognition tasks available in other languages are limited to negative emotions and do not account for emotional cues evoked by voice and gestures. Although some tasks evaluating other domains of social cognition are available in English, it remains essential to validate and norm them with a French-speaking Canadian population.
Principal Investigator
Maxime Montembeault, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. Researcher at the Douglas Research Centre. Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, UdeM. Member of the RQRV.
Objectives
The first objective of this study is to develop, validate, and norm a battery of four social cognition tests for the elderly French-speaking Canadian population (n = 100).
The second objective is to obtain pilot data on the comparison of performance between subjects with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the three variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA), and Alzheimer’s type dementia (ATD) (n = 4 per group).
