Studying realistic social interactions usinf fMRI: a pilot project
| Responsable du projet | Amélie Achim |
| Collaborateur |
Marion Fossard
Pascale Tremblay |
| Résumé |
This pilot study aims to demonstrate that social cognition and
underlying social and non-social cognitive processes can be
measured with fMRI during real social (verbal) interactions. Social
cognition designates the cognitive processes that support social
interactions. These processes are highly affected in people with
schizophrenia and are the best predictors of these patients’
functional outcome. Despite the impact of social cognition
deficits, we however know little about the neural mechanisms that
lead from difficulties in understanding others to difficulties in
interacting with others as previous social cognition studies have
exclusively relied on non-interactive tasks. Though measuring
social cognition during interactive tasks is a great challenge, a
SSHRC-funded research project led by Amelie Achim
(Université Laval, psychiatrie et neurosciences) and Marion
Fossard (Université de Neuchâtel, Département
de logopédie) has recently demonstrated that social
cognition can be measured behaviourally during real, controlled
social interactions using a referential communication paradigm (see
project’s methods) and a fine analysis of verbal/referential
productions. This project also showed that schizophrenia patients
have difficulties adapting their verbal/referential productions to
their interlocutor’s likely knowledge (Achim et al., 2012). Our new
collaboration with Pascale Tremblay (Université Laval,
Rehabilitation), a specialist of verbal communication and cognition
who has a unique expertise in assessing speech production using
fMRI, is central to bringing this method to fMRI to understand the
nature of the neurocognitive mechanisms that are at play during
real social interactions and that impact effective communication.
As part of this pilot project, ten participants with no psychiatric
illness and four patients with schizophrenia will be scanned while
performing an adapted version of our referential communication
paradigm. This interactive task requires the participants to
present a series of characters to an interlocutor (who will be in
the control room), so that the interlocutor can identify the
character from a larger set of images. All the characters will be
known to the participant but will be selected so that only half on
them can safely be assumed to be known to the interlocutor, a woman
in her twenties. As observed in our previous behavioural study, we
expect that our participants will adapt their referential
expressions to the state of knowledge of their interlocutor (i.e.
use more names for likely known character and more description for
likely unknown characters), but that this pattern will not be as
pronounced in schizophrenia patients. A sparse sampling fMRI
protocol, which involves periods of silence (MRI gradients turned
off) interleaved with periods of data acquisition, will be used to
mitigate motion concerns, and to record verbal responses using an
MRI compatible microphone. This project relies on a very innovative
and interactive protocol whose design results from the combined
expertise of three young researchers with complementary background
in social cognition (AA), in linguistics (MF) and in speech and
hearing research (PT). Though there is a recognized need to study
social cognition with interactive paradigms to truly understand how
these processes influence everyday interactions, few such tasks
exist and those that do typically allow for a very limited set of
behaviour (ex: press one of three buttons), limiting the ecological
validity that is required to understand the impact of social
cognition processes on real social interactions. Once our paradigm
is validated through the current RBIQ pilot project, we are
confident that this will lay the foundation for successful CIHR or
NARSAD applications for funding to understand the neural bases of
social deficits in schizophrenia, and eventually lead to new
collaborations to study these deficits in other clinical
populations with recognized social cognition and social interaction
deficits. |
| Mots-clés |
social cognition, interactions, fMRI |
| Type de projet | Recherche fondamentale |
| Domaine de recherche | neurosciences |
| Source de financement | QBIN (Quebec Bio-imaging Network) |
| Etat | Terminé |
| Début de projet | 9-9-2013 |
| Fin du projet | 8-8-2014 |
| Budget alloué | 10000 CHF |
| Contact | Marion Fossard |