NCT00061334

Investigating the Cognitive Processes That Underlie Social Knowledge and Behavior

Social Knowledge Representation in the Human Prefrontal Cortex

• Status: Completed
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 222 (actual)
• Sponsor: National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) · NIH
• Sex: All
• Age: 21 Years – 65 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The purpose of the protocol is to localize the neural regions and systems mediating the forms of knowledge representations hypothesized by the principal investigator to be stored in the human prefrontal cortex. Utilizing a variety of experimental neuropsychological tasks during functional MRI, we will investigate hypotheses regarding the role of the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in social cognition and emotional processing. We will ascertain the relationship between so-called cold cognition such as event knowledge and "hot" social cognition such as attitude formation and specific brain regions within the prefrontal cortex. We will also attempt to determine the relationship between non-frontal neural structures involved in emotional expressions, such as amygdala, and those frontal neural structures involved in executive functions that may modulate emotion. The data that we collect in this protocol will be of value in (1) identifying a set of neural regions and distributed networks mediating the forms of knowledge representation stored in the prefrontal cortex and (2) developing functional MRI screening measures for subjects at-risk for developing a neurological disorder. We will also use the data obtained in these studies with healthy adult volunteers to constrain theories of frontal lobe function based on the study of patients with focal or diffuse frontal lobe lesions and to provide convergent evidence for the role of specific frontal cortex sectors in specific cognitive functions.

Detailed description

Objective The purpose of the protocol is to localize the neural regions and systems mediating the forms of knowledge representations hypothesized by the principal investigator to be stored in the human prefrontal cortex. We suspect that political attitudes can also be viewed as a type of stored knowledge. Religious attitudinal and event knowledge are also expected to be similarly represented and stored. Utilizing a variety of experimental neuropsychological tasks during functional MRI, we will investigate hypotheses regarding the role of the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in social cognition and emotional processing. We will ascertain the relationship between so-called "cold" cognition such as event knowledge and "hot" social cognition such as attitude formation and specific brain regions within the prefrontal cortex. Study Population Normal adult volunteers will participate in experiments dealing with processing of event knowledge, general attitudes, political stereotypes and attitudes, and religious attitudes, using fMRI. Design All the experiments will employ within-subject event-related fMRI design to determine whether activations of different cortical areas correspond to different kind of stored knowledge. Outcome Measures The data that we collect in this protocol will consist of fMRI activation images corresponding to varying neuropsychological tasks. The will be of value in (1) identifying a set of neural regions and distributed networks mediating the forms of knowledge representation stored in the prefrontal cortex and (2) developing functional MRI screening measures for subjects at-risk for developing a neurological disorder.

Conditions

• Healthy

Timeline

• Start date: 2003-05-07
• Completion: 2011-12-29
• First posted: 2003-05-26
• Last updated: 2017-07-02

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States