Social information processing in naturalistic settings: Insights from Autism Spectrum Disorders
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Real life social settings provide us with a multitude of dynamic social information (e.g. facial expressions, tone of voice, body language). Our ability to process and integrate this information to a whole is crucial for understanding others’ mental states (i.e. mentalizing) and subsequently formulating an adequate social response. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are characterized by severe social impairments, which have been linked to aberrant neural and behavioral processing of social stimuli. However, given that typical laboratory settings differ greatly from real life social interactions, it remains unclear how the experimental results obtained with mostly abstract and static stimuli can be generalized to dynamic social information processing in naturalistic settings. Study 1 introduced two naturalistic video-based behavioral tasks for a performance based assessment of implicit (i.e. spontaneous) and explicit (i.e. controlled, more cognitively demanding) mental state inferences. The aim of this study was to characterize implicit and explicit social cognitive processes – how they are to be differentiated in typically developed individuals and individuals with ASD. Study 2 investigated the neural mechanisms of spontaneous, naturalistic mentalizing in individuals with ASD and typically developed controls. Furthermore, the study aimed at relating neural processing of mental states in naturalistic settings to accurate implicit mental state inferences as measured with the behavioral task introduced in study 1. Study 3 aimed at extending insights on dynamic social information processing to the auditory modality. Here, neural processing of emotional prosody (i.e. tone of voice) and behavioral prosody recognition performance were investigated with newly developed naturalistic tasks in individuals with ASD and typically developed controls. Similar to study 2, in a next step, the relationship between neural and behavioral prosody processing was investigated. In typically developed individuals, implicit and explicit social cognitive processes were distinguishable to a certain degree on the behavioral and neural level. Neural activity in the amygdala correlated with accurate implicitsocial behavior, and activity in a network including fronto-temporal regions such as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) predicted explicit social behavior. Individuals with ASD performed lower on tasks addressing implicit and explicit social cognitive processes, whereby these different sets of processes were closely linked. On the neural level, the social impairments of individuals with ASD were associated with reduced activity of the amygdala and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and a reduced relationship between neural processing of social information and accurate social behavior compared to controls. On the basis of the current literature and the three empirical studies of this dissertation, I propose a neurocognitive model of typical and impaired social information processing in naturalistic settings. The proposed model aims at advancing the current literature by integrating behavioral and neuroscientific research on dynamic social information processing in typically developed individuals and individuals characterized by severe social impairments.
Author: Rosenblau, Gabriela
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
OpenAlex ID: W1874162932