NCT07434037

The Neurocognitive Bases of Trust in Intellectual Disability

The Neurocognitive Bases of Trust in Intellectual Disability: Affective Evaluation, Trait Attribution, and Epistemic Vigilance

• Status: Not Yet Recruiting
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 112 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Hospices Civils de Lyon · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 3 Years – 29 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This project studies the neurocognitive basis of trust adjustment in intellectual disability (ID), a source of significant vulnerability for these patients, focusing on two target populations chosen for their specific social characteristics: people with Down syndrome, who are often described as being hypersocial, and people with Fragile X syndrome, who are often characterized by a completely opposite social behaviour profile, with a withdrawn attitude and significant social anxiety. The three different types of mechanisms that contribute to the adjustment of interpersonal trust: affective evaluation, trait attribution, and epistemic evaluation of informants, will be studied. Affective evaluation processes recruit subcortical structures such as the amygdala and assess potential social threats in the environment. The second mechanism for selecting whom to trust consists of forming a representation of a person's dispositions, such as benevolence and competence (also known as traits), and using it to predict that person's future behaviour. Trait attribution processes recruit a cortico-cerebellar network comprising the mPFC, CRUS I and posterior lobule VI. The third mechanism, called epistemic vigilance, allows to adjust our trust in what others communicate to us. This mechanism involves linking the assessment of the reliability of individuals who communicate (based on their benevolence and competence) with the reliability of the communicated information. Epistemic assessment involves frontal areas and areas associated with the representation of mental states in order to enable the evaluation of the truthfulness of the communicated information. All of these mechanisms become functional very early on, before a child's sixth birthday. There are reasons to expect that several of these central mechanisms supporting selective trust will behave atypically in intellectual disability.

Conditions

• Down Syndrome (Trisomy 21)
• Fragile X Syndrome (FXS)

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Confidence adjustment assessment	Interpersonal trust assessment including a series of behavioural and eye-tracking studies (Paradigm 1 : Forming impressions using facial cues; Paradigm 2 : Forming impressions using behaviors) and assessment of epistemic trust (Paradigm 3 : assessing informants, Paradigm 4 : vigilance towards deception), will be performed at visit V1.
OTHER	clinical assessment	Clinical assessment including Medical history, developmental trajectory, epilepsy history, clinical examination, presence of autism spectrum disorder, presence of cardiopathy, will be performed at visit V1.
OTHER	Cognitive assessment	Cognitive assessment including Raven Matrix, Wechsler Scale (WISC-V or WAIS IV), Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale II, PPVT5, EVT3, will be performed at visit V1.
OTHER	Executive function assessment	Executive function assessment including Laby 5-12 test, day/night Test, Questionnaire BRIEF-2, will be performed at visit V1.
OTHER	Sociability assessment	Sociability assessment including Social Responsiveness Scale 2, Revised Preschool Anxiety Scale, two eye-tracking tasks (social scenes and social preference), Perception bias task, Distance adjustment task, Social motivation tasks, Examiner's assistance task, will be performed at visit V1.
OTHER	Brain MRI (structural and functional)	Optional brain MRI acquisition (structural and functional) will be performed at ancillary visit

Timeline

• Start date: 2026-02-01
• Primary completion: 2029-02-01
• Completion: 2029-12-01
• First posted: 2026-02-25
• Last updated: 2026-02-25

Locations

1 site across 1 country: France