Posts tagged social interaction

The day of the big barbecue arrives and it’s time to fire up the grill. But rather than toss the hamburgers and hotdogs haphazardly onto the grate, you wait for the heat to reach an optimal temperature, and then neatly lay them out in their apportioned areas according to size and cooking times. Meanwhile, your friend is preparing the beverages. Cups are grabbed face down from the stack, turned over, and – using the other hand – filled with ice.

While these tasks – like countless, everyday actions – may seem trivial at first glance, they are actually fairly complex, according to Robrecht van der Wel, an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers–Camden. “For instance, the observation that you grab a glass differently when you are filling a beverage than when you are stacking glasses suggests that you are thinking about the goal that you want to achieve,” he says. “How do you manipulate the glass? How do you coordinate your actions so that the liquid goes into the cup?  These kinds of actions are not just our only way to accomplish our intentions, but they reveal our intentions and mental states as well.”

van der Wel and his research partners, Marlene Meyer and Sabine Hunnius, turned their attention to how action planning generalizes to collaborative actions performed with others in a study, titled Higher-order planning for individual and joint object manipulations, published recently in Experimental Brain Research.

According to van der Wel, the researchers were especially interested in determining whether people’s actions exhibit certain social capabilities when performing multiple-action sequences in concert with a partner. “It is a pretty astonishing ability that we, as people, are able to plan and coordinate our actions with others,” says van der Wel. “If people plan ahead for themselves, what happens if they are now in a task where their action might influence another person’s comfort? Do they actually take that into account or not, even though, for their personal action, it makes no difference?”

In the research study, participants first completed a series of individual tasks requiring them to pick up a cylindrical object with one hand, pass it to their other hand, and then place it on a shelf. In the collaborative tasks, individuals picked up the object and handed it to their partner, who placed it on the shelf. The researchers varied the height of the shelf, to test whether people altered their grasps to avoid uncomfortable end postures. The object could only be grasped at one of two positions, implying that the first grasp would determine the postures – and comfort – of the remaining actions.

According to the researchers, the results from both the individual and joint performances show that participants altered their grasp location relative to the height of the shelf.  The participants in both scenarios were thus more likely to use a low-grasp location when the shelf was low, and vice versa. Doing so implied that the participants ended the sequences in comfortable postures. The researchers conclude that, in both individual and collaborative scenarios, participants engaged in extended planning to finish the object-transport sequences in a relatively comfortable posture. Given that participants did plan ahead for the sake of their action partner, it indicates an implicit social awareness that supports collaboration across individuals.

van der Wel notes that, while such basic actions may seem insignificant, it is important to understand how people perform basic tasks such as manipulating objects when considering those populations that aren’t able to complete them so efficiently. “How to pick up an object seems like a really trivial problem when you look at healthy adults, but as soon as you look at children, or people suffering from a stroke, it takes some time to develop that skill properly,” says van der Wel. “When someone has a stroke, it is not that they have damage to the musculature involved in doing the task; rather, damage to action planning areas in the brain results in an inability to perform simple actions. A better understanding of the mechanisms involved in action planning may guide rehabilitation strategies in such cases.”

According to van der Wel, the researchers are currently working on modifying the task to determine the age at which children begin planning their actions with respect to other peoples’ comfort. In particular, they want to understand how the development of social action planning links with the development of other cognitive and social abilities.

(Source: news.rutgers.edu)

Our researchers have found a previously undiscovered link between epileptic seizures and the signs of autism in adults.

Dr SallyAnn Wakeford from the Department of Psychology revealed that adults with epilepsy were more likely to have higher traits of autism and Asperger syndrome.

Characteristics of autism, which include impairment in social interaction and communication as well as restricted and repetitive interests, can be severe and go unnoticed for many years, having tremendous impact on the lives of those who have them.

The research found that epileptic seizures disrupt the neurological function that affects social functioning in the brain resulting in the same traits seen in autism.

Dr Wakeford said: “The social difficulties in epilepsy have been so far under-diagnosed and research has not uncovered any underlying theory to explain them. This new research links social difficulties to a deficit in somatic markers in the brain, explaining these characteristics in adults with epilepsy.”

Dr Wakeford and her colleagues discovered that having increased autistic traits was common to all epilepsy types, however, this was more pronounced for adults with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE).

The researchers suggest that one explanation may be because anti-epileptic drugs are often less effective for TLE. The reason why they suspect these drugs are implicated is because they were strongly related to the severity of autistic characteristics.

Dr Wakeford carried out a comprehensive range of studies with volunteers with epilepsy and discovered that all of the adults with epilepsy showed autism traits.

She said: “It is unknown whether these adults had a typical developmental period during childhood or whether they were predisposed to having autistic traits before the onset of their epilepsy. However what is known is that the social components of autistic characteristics in adults with epilepsy may be explained by social cognitive differences, which have largely been unrecognised until now.”

Dr Wakeford said the findings could lead to improved treatment for people with epilepsy and autism. She said: “Epilepsy has a history of cultural stigma, however the more we understand about the psychological consequences of epilepsy the more we can remove the stigma and mystique of this condition.

“These findings could mean that adults with epilepsy get access to better services, as there is a wider range of treatments available for those with autism condition.”

Margaret Rawnsley, research administration officer at Epilepsy Action welcomed the findings.

She said: “We welcome any research that could further our understanding of epilepsy and ultimately improve the lives of those with the condition. This research has the potential to tell us more about the links between epilepsy and other conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders.”

(Source: bath.ac.uk)

Most infants respond to a game of peek-a-boo with smiles at the very least, and, for those who find the activity particularly entertaining, gales of laughter. For infants with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), however, the game can be distressing rather than pleasant, and they’ll do their best to tune out all aspects of it –– and that includes the people playing with them.

That disengagement is a hallmark of ASD, and one of the characteristics that amplifies the disorder as infants develop into children and then adults.

A study conducted by researchers at the Koegel Autism Center at UC Santa Barbara has found that replacing such games in favor of those the infant prefers can actually lessen the severity of the infants’ ASD symptoms, and, perhaps, alleviate the condition altogether. Their work is highlighted the current issue of the Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions.

Lynn Koegel, clinical director of the center and the study’s lead author, described the game-playing protocol as a modified Pivotal Response Treatment (PVT). Developed at UCSB, PRT is based on principles of positive motivation. The researchers identified the activities that seemed to be more enjoyable to the infants and taught the respective parents to focus on those rather than on the typical games they might otherwise choose. “We had them play with their infants for short periods, and then give them some kind of social reward,” Koegel said. “Over time, we conditioned the infants to enjoy all the activities that were presented by pairing the less desired activities with the highly desired ones.” The social reward is preferable to, say, a toy, Koegel noted, because it maintains the ever-crucial personal interaction.

"The idea is to get them more interested in people," she continued, "to focus on their socialization. If they’re avoiding people and avoiding interacting, that creates a whole host of other issues. They don’t form friendships, and then they don’t get the social feedback that comes from interacting with friends."

According to Koegel, by the end of the relatively short one- to three-month intervention period, which included teaching the parents how to implement the procedures, all the infants in the study had normal reactions to stimuli. “Two of the three have no disabilities at all, and the third is very social,” she said. “The third does have a language delay, but that’s more manageable than some of the other issues.”

On a large scale, Koegel hopes to establish some benchmark for identifying social deficits in infants so parents and health care providers can intervene sooner rather than later. “We have a grant from the Autism Science Foundation to look at lots of babies and try to really figure out which signs are red flags, and which aren’t,” she said. “A number of the infants who show signs of autism will turn out to be perfectly fine; but we’re saying, let’s not take the risk if we can put an intervention in play that really works. Then we don’t have to worry about whether or not these kids would develop the full-blown symptoms of autism.”

Historically, ASD is diagnosed in children 18 months or older, and treatment generally begins around 4 years. “You can pretty reliably diagnose kids at 18 months, especially the more severe cases,” said Koegel. “The mild cases might be a little harder, especially if the child has some verbal communication. There are a few measures –– like the ones we used in our study –– that can diagnose kids pre-language, even as young as six months. But ours was the first that worked with children under 12 months and found an effective intervention.”

Given the increasing number of children being diagnosed with ASD, Koegel’s findings could be life altering –– literally. “When you consider that the recommended intervention for preschoolers with autism is 30 to 40 hours per week of one-on-one therapy, this is a fairly easy fix,” she said. “We did a single one-hour session per week for four to 12 weeks until the symptoms improved, and some of these infants were only a few months old. We saw a lot of positive change.”

(Source: ia.ucsb.edu)

Most people are so attuned to the nuances of social interaction that they can detect clues to mental illness while playing a strategy game with someone they have never met.

That was the finding of a team of scientists led by Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. The researchers discovered that healthy people and those with borderline personality disorder displayed different patterns of behavior while playing an online strategy game, so much so that when healthy players played people with borderline personality disorder, they gave up on trying to predict what their partners would do next.

For their large neuroimaging study, the scientists used a multiround social interaction game, the investor-trustee game, to study the level of strategic thinking in 195 pairs of subjects. In each pair, one player played the investor and the other the trustee. The investor chose how much money to send the trustee, and the trustee in turn decided how much to return to the investor. Profit required the cooperation of both players.

“This classic tit-for-tat game allows us to probe people’s responses to the social gestures of others,” said Montague, who also directs the Computational Psychiatry Unit, an academic center that uses computational models to understand mental disease. “It further allows us to see how people form models of one another. These insights are important for understanding a range of mental illnesses, as the ability to infer other people’s intentions is an essential component of healthy cognition.”

The scientists classified the investors according to varying levels of strategic depth of thought. The healthy subjects fell into three categories: about half simply responded to the amount the other player sent; about one-quarter built a model of their partner’s behavior; and the remaining quarter considered not just their model of their partner, but also their partner’s models of them. 

Not surprisingly, the depth-of-thought style of play correlated with success, with the players who looked deeper into interactions making considerably more money than those who played at a shallow level.

When healthy subjects played people with borderline personality disorder, though, they were far less likely to exhibit depth of thought.

“People with borderline personality disorder are characterized by their unstable relationships, and when they play this game, they tend to break cooperation,” said Montague. “The healthy subjects picked up on the erratic behavior, likely without even realizing it, and far fewer played strategically.”

Notably, the functional magnetic resonance imaging of the subjects’ brains revealed that each category of player showed distinct neural correlates of learning signals associated with differing depths of thought. The scientists used hyperscanning, a technique Montague invented that enables subjects in different brain scanners to interact in real time, regardless of geography. Hyperscanning allows scientists to eavesdrop on brain activity during social exchanges in scanners, whether across the hallway or across the world.

“We’re always modeling other people, and our brains have a substantial amount of neural tissue devoted to pondering our interactions with other people,” Montague said. “This study is a start to turning neural signals into numbers – not just theory-of-mind arguments, but actual numbers. And when we can do that across thousands of people, we should start to gain insights into psychopathologies – what circuits are involved, what brain regions are engaged, and how injuries, congenital disorders, and genetic defects might play into psychiatric illness.”

Montague believes the study represents a significant contribution to the field of computational psychiatry, which seeks to bring computational clout to efforts to understand mental dysfunction. “Traditional psychiatric categories are useful yet incomplete,” said Montague, who delivered a TEDGlobal talk on the growing field of computational psychiatry last year. “Computational psychiatry enables us to redefine with a new lexicon – a mathematical one – the standard ways we think about mental illness.”

Computationally based insights may one day help psychiatry achieve better precision in diagnosis and treatment, Montague said. But until scientists have the right instruments, they cannot even begin to make those connections.

“The exquisite sensitivity that most people have to social gestures gives us a valuable opening,” Montague said. “We’re hoping to invent a tool – almost a human inkblot test – for identifying and characterizing mental disorders in which social interactions go awry.”

(Source: vtnews.vt.edu)