Social Perception in Mesial Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: Interpreting Social Information From Moving Shapes and Biological Motion

Abstract

Dysfunction in the understanding of social signals has been reported in persons with epilepsy, which may partially explain lower levels of life satisfaction in this patient population. Extensive assessment is necessary, particularly when the mesial temporal lobe, responsible for emotion processing, is affected. The authors examined multiple levels of social perception in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE), including judgments of point-light motion displays of human communicative interactions (Communicative Interactions Database-5 Alternative Forced Choice format) and theory-of-mind processes evaluated using geometric shapes (Frith-Happé animations [FHA]). This case-control study included MTLE patients with anterior temporal lobectomies (ATL+) (N=19), MTLE patients without lobectomies (ATL-) (N=21), and healthy controls (HCs) (N=20). Both groups of MTLE patients were less efficient in recognizing goal-directed and mentalizing interactions of FHA compared with HC subjects. The ATL+ group attributed emotions to FHA less accurately than HC subjects. Both the ATL- and ATL+ groups classified individual point-light animations more often as communicative than the HC group. ATL+ patients were also less efficient in interpreting point-light animations in terms of individual actions than the HC group. The number of years of epilepsy duration was inversely correlated with recognition of FHA interactions. The mean number of seizures was inversely correlated with the interaction identification in point-light stimuli. Patients with MTLE, irrespective of surgical treatment, present impaired social perception in domains assessed with abstract moving shapes or nonabstract biological motion. This impairment may be the basis of problems faced by patients reporting difficulties in understanding the intentions and feelings of other individuals.

Untangling the Ties Between Social Cognition and Body Motion: Gender Impact

“…Some aspects of BM processing are atypical in ASD (e.g., Klin et al, 2009;Nackaerts et al, 2012;Jack et al, 2017), schizophrenia (e.g., Kim et al, 2011;Hastings et al, 2013;Spencer et al, 2013;Hashimoto et al, 2014;Vaskinn et al, 2016Vaskinn et al, , 2018Engelstad et al, 2017Engelstad et al, , 2018aOkruszek et al, 2018) and schizotypal personality disorder (Hur et al, 2016), bipolar disorders , attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Kröger et al, 2014), anxiety disorders and in individuals with elevated anxiety (van de Cruys et al, 2013;Heenan and Troje, 2015), obsessive compulsive disorders (Kim et al, 2008), and unipolar depression (Loi et al, 2013;Kaletsch et al, 2014). Deficits are also reported in individuals who were born preterm and suffer congenital brain lesions ), Alzheimer's (Henry et al, 2012;Insch et al, 2015) and Parkinson's diseases (Cao et al, 2015;Jaywant et al, 2016a,b;Kloeters et al, 2017), epilepsy (Bala et al, 2018), and eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia (Zucker et al, 2013;Lang et al, 2015;Dapelo et al, 2017). Most of these disorders that are characterized by aberrant social cognition display a skewed sex ratio: females and males are affected differently in terms of clinical picture, prevalence, and severity (Pavlova, 2012(Pavlova, , 2017a.…”

Social Perception and Interaction Database—A Novel Tool to Study Social Cognitive Processes With Point-Light Displays

“…However, the reverse pattern (intact explicit recognition of actions, but no interpersonal predictive coding during an implicit task) was observed in high-functioning individuals with ASD (24). At the same time, the scope of the previous research in this area, due to the limited availability of the stimuli, has been limited to recognition of intentions from standard communicative gestures from either single (38) or dyadic (22,24,25) displays. Therefore, use of the SoPID may extend the area of investigation of future studies to neuropsychiatric populations, by enabling the examination of behavioral and neural responses to a wide range of individual actions and communicative actions with or without emotional content.…”

“…Thus, betweengroup differences observed in studies based on paradigms that utilize full-displays of actors to examine communicative interactions processing in neuropsychiatric populations may be affected by other perceptual issues or potentially distracting elements of visual displays. Decreased recognition of affective states and/or communicative intentions from point-light displays have previously been documented in individuals with ASD (35), patients with schizophrenia (36), affective disorders (37), neurodegenerative diseases (38) and temporal lobe epilepsy (25). Furthermore, previous studies that used CID stimuli have provided evidence that a double dissociation between explicit and implicit processes associated with communicative interactions detection may be observed in two neuropsychiatric populations (23,24).…”

“…CID stimuli have been used to examine both reflective (2) and reflexive (1) social cognitive processes in healthy individuals. Stimuli from the CID have also been used to create a multilingual task for studying communicative interaction recognition (2), which has been effectively applied to study social cognition across various clinical populations [patients with schizophrenia (22,23), high functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (24), patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (25)]. Furthermore, CID stimuli have been applied to investigate the neural correlates of communicative interactions processing (10,11).…”

Social Perception and Interaction Database – a novel tool to study social cognitive processes with point-light displays

“…CID stimuli have been used to examine both reflective (Manera et al, 2015) and reflexive (Manera, Becchio, et al, 2011) social cognitive processes in healthy individuals. Stimuli from the CID have also been used to create a multilingual task for studying communicative interaction recognition (Manera et al, 2015), which has been effectively applied to study social cognition across various clinical populations (patients with schizophrenia (Okruszek et al, 2015; Okruszek, Piejka, Wysokinski, Szczepocka, & Manera, 2018), high functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (von der Lühe et al, 2016), patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (Bala et al, 2018)). Furthermore, CID stimuli have been applied to investigate the neural correlates of communicative processing (Isik et al, 2017; Walbrin et al, 2018).…”