Social cognition allows people to interpret behavior and to make sense of themselves, of others, and of the social world around them; it includes perception of facial emotion and speech prosody, the generation of responses to these perceptions, and the enacting of appropriate behavior in return. Existing cognitive models suggest that these functions may be broken down into components referable to specific neuroanatomic regions, particularly the frontal lobes and the temporal lobe of the non-dominant hemisphere. Since it is intimately involved with dysfunction in salient anatomic regions, intractable epilepsy provides a natural window into social cognitive functions.
Specific Aim 1 for this project is to test specific components of the social cognitive system in patients with intractable epilepsy before and after resective surgery to the non-dominant hemisphere. This will be done using multiple, scientifically-validated modalities of social assessment; changes in these functions will be interpreted in light of the anatomy of surgical resection. Detection and understanding of such deficits would have an important impact on planning epilepsy surgery in the non-dominant hemisphere by identifying potential cognitive risks of such surgery.
Specific Aim 2 is to use magnetic source imaging (MSl) to construct pre-surgical maps of cortical activation during the discrimination of social cognitive perceptual cues. In time, this work could lead to noninvasive pre-surgical mapping of social cognitive functions to assist with preoperative planning and to allow tailored resections that could avoid regions whose loss might be associated with postoperative deficits in social cognition. Outstanding resources and mentorship are available at UCSF in the Epilepsy Center, the Memory and Aging Center, and the Biomagnetic Imaging Center. By drawing on these resources, this proposal will combine clinical research experience, formal coursework, and mentorship to build upon Dr. Majors' training in epileptology and cognitive neuroscience. This will allow her to meet her career goals: To improve cognitive outcomes in patients with intractable epilepsy, to improve pre-surgical functional cortical mapping, to extend cortical mapping methods to the study of frontal lobe and non-dominant hemisphere function, and to use the unique clinical opportunity provided by resective epilepsy surgery (and associated brain mapping) to test hypotheses in systems neuroscience. ? ?
