Theory of mind abilities in old adults did not receive attention until Happe, Winner, and Brownell (1998) found that the theory of mind performance improved with advancing age. However, Maylor, Moulson, Muncer, and Taylor (2002) and Sullivan and Ruffman (2004) reported that the old adults performed worse than the young adults on theory of mind stories. We used "strange stories" (Happe et al., 1998; Maylor et al., 2002) and faux pas stories (Stone Baron-Cohen, Calder, Keane, & Young, 2003) separately to examine the theory of mind abilities of an old and a young group with IQ and educational level matched. We found that the performance of the old group was worse than that of the young group on the faux pas stories, especially in the faux pas understanding, but no significant difference existed between the two age groups in the strange stories understanding. Moreover, the performance on the faux pas and strange stories for both old and young adults was separately independent of fluid intelligence, full-scale IQ, verbal IQ, and performance IQ.

Key words: theory of mind, old adults, strange stories, faux pas stories