Dissociable brain activity for high-stakes deception detection in young and older adults

While anyone can fall victim to deception with deleterious impact, age-related changes in financial, cognitive, socioemotional, and neurobiological factors convey greater risk to older adults. Neural responses underlying deception detection may elucidate age-related vulnerability or resilience to deception. Here, we examined 53 young (18-33 years) and 50 older (55-78 years) adults who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while aiming to detect deception in naturalistic, high-stakes videos (i.e. pleas for information about a missing relative, where later some of the pleaders were found guilty in the murder of the missing relative). Behaviourally, young and older adults had comparably poor performance at detecting deceptive pleas. Further, we observed a multivariate pattern of brain activity, including visual and parietal areas that differentiated genuine from deceptive pleas across age groups. Reflecting individual variation, older adults with higher sensitivity to deception had stronger activation of brain regions associated with mentalizing (e.g. medial prefrontal cortex) and cognitive control (e.g. anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) during deception detection. Together, our findings build on extant models of decision-making in ageing to show that age differences in brain function may facilitate compensation among some older adults to identify deception.