Project Summary

Ralph Adolphs, Ph.D. (Distinguished Investigator 2005) of California Institute of Technology and University of Iowa, notes that essentially every mental disease features impairments in social behavior, many of which are presumed to result in large part from dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex. However, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie this dysfunction, their reliance on specific neuroanatomical sectors in the prefrontal cortex, or their role during development. To address these issues, Dr. Adolphs will study a unique patient population: subjects with focal damage to the prefrontal cortex, sustained either in early childhood or adulthood, from the Patient Registry at the University of Iowa's Department of Neurology. In collaboration with another researcher, he will investigate two key areas of function of possible impairment: social learning and social perception. Prior studies with such patients have indicated that their behavior is marked by an inability to trigger emotional responses to socially salient stimuli, an inability to learn from social punishment, and an inability to regulate social behavior in real life. He will obtain three dependent measures: cognitive judgments of social stimuli, psychophysiological (autonomic) emotional response (measured with skin conductance response and EKG), and eye movements made while viewing social stimuli (with an eye tracker). While Dr. Adolphs is an expert on neurobiological investigations of social cognition in humans, he has never investigated this population. The findings would be important not only for a better understanding of the role of the prefrontal cortex in development and a better understanding of the disorders mentioned above, but also for a better understanding of aggression, violence, and psychopathy, the most prominent features following developmental damage to the prefrontal cortex. Obtaining insights into the basic mechanisms and into the role that this brain region plays during development will be an important step in designing rehabilitative strategies in the future. Dr. Adolphs will utilize pilot data from the NARSAD study to seek NIMH funding. He also intends to extend the studies to psychopaths who do not have bona fide structural frontal lobe damage, to test the hypothesis that they may have some of the same impairments, perhaps attributable to prefrontal dysfunction. The findings will be an important complement to his studies of social cognition in other populations, such as patients with amygdala lesions and autism.

Program Area: PERVASIVE DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS\Autism

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