Neural Communication between Mentalizing and Working Memory Processes for Social Cognition

• Applicant: Dr. Elisabeth Friedrich-Higgs
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 382409655

Imagine you have felt different your entire life. You are awkward in conversations, you cannot relate to the stories of others, and you are often surprised by their reactions. This is the case for any number of people with undiagnosed deficits in social cognition, and for almost everyone with a diagnosed mental disorder, but for whom no real treatment is available. Social cognition is one of the most critical research topics in neuroscience today. More work is needed to fully understand how mentalizing (i.e. the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others) and working memory (i.e. a cognitive system for transient manipulation and storage of information) processes collaborate to create successful social cognition. This would lead to the development of better treatment options. In this project, we aim to extend neuroimaging findings by investigating the temporal communication mechanisms for social cognition with Electroencephalography (EEG). This will be combined with neuronavigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), an approach that will allow us to draw causal conclusions for prefrontal cortex functioning. Our experimental design will test both, tasks in the social modality as well as in the traditionally used verbal and visuospatial modalities. Task load will be varied in order to ascertain the way in which the prefrontal cortex allocates cognitive resources. The inclusion of individuals showing high autistic traits will allow conclusions as to whether the discovered neural communication mechanisms can explain the extent of autistic traits, and the performance in social cognition.Specifically, we will investigate how theta oscillations in the 4-8 Hz frequency range in the prefrontal cortex control gamma oscillations (30-100 Hz) in posterior brain areas. We hypothesize that cognitive resources will be allocated by a frontal theta phase to posterior gamma amplitude coupling for all task modalities (i.e. social, verbal visuospatial). Thus, the load condition will determine if bursts of posterior gamma are locked closely to the excitatory phase of theta (i.e. high load) or to the inhibitory phase (i.e. low load). The task modality will determine which specific brain region(s) will drive this communication mechanism. We hypothesize that the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) is responsible for working memory processes and thus necessary in all task modalities. The Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex (DMPFC) is the core region for mentalizing and drives the frontal theta phase to posterior gamma amplitude coupling in interactions with the DLPFC for the visuospatial and social modalities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Paul Sauseng