Background: It is increasingly recognised that social cognition should form part of our cognitive and communication assessments of people with brain disorders. The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) uses naturalistic videos to assess emotion perception, theory of mind and understanding of pragmatic inference (like sarcasm). While widely used, TASIT is lengthy to administer. We recently developed a short version based on Rasch analysis with 10, 9 and 9 items for Parts 1,2 and 3 respectively. In this paper we report on normal adult performance on TASIT-S, comparing USA and Australian speakers.

Method: 181 USA speakers (mean age 35) completed TASIT-S online (via mTurk). Their performance was compared to 161 Australian speakers (mean age 38) who were administered TASIT-S face to face. An additional 65 Australian adults were included to examine the effects of age on performance.

Results: USA speakers performed slightly better on emotion recognition and judging sincere items than Australians. Australians were slightly better detecting lies but overall performance across cultures was comparable. Australians aged over 60 (mean age 68) were uniformly poorer than younger adults (mean age 36) on all parts of TASIT-S. There was no effect of gender. More educated adults performed better on TASIT-S part 2.

Conclusions: Despite having to understand actors with Australian accents, this study shows that USA speakers perform comparably to Australians. The main influence on TASIT-S performance was age and, to a less extent, education. These norms provide a useful framework for using TASIT-S in clinical settings.