Affiliation:
1. Cognus Institute for Research, Brazil
2. Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
Abstract
Social cognition is an umbrella term for the brain process underlying social behavior. Neurodegenerative dementia might affect the social cognition domains in different ways and degrees. Therefore, each type of dementia has a distinct profile of social cognitive impairments. This chapter presents a discussion about social cognition in healthy aging and in the most prevalent dementia subtypes, Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FDT). The available data about mentalizing, emotional contagion, and perception of social cues in AD and FTD variants are analyzed based on the correlation between behavioral and neuroimaging findings.