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Grounding social words: Multimodal neurocognitive insights from clinical and subclinical populations
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Adolfo García1,2,3; 1Cognitive Neuroscience Center, Department of Life and Behavioral Sciences, Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2Global Brain Health Institute, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA; and Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, 3Departamento de Lingüística y Literatura, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile
INTRODUCTION: Recent neurocognitive frameworks emphasize that social words (lexical units denoting interpersonal traits, behaviors, and events) are grounded in embodied and situated experiences. Accordingly, their processing would depend on the reactivation of socio-cognitive and affective systems shaped through daily experience. While most evidence comes from healthy populations, complementary basic and translational insights can be gained by examining groups with disrupted social functioning. Here, I introduce a framework integrating multimodal neural and behavioral measures across three studies in individuals with primary (behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia [bvFTD], Study 1), secondary (spinocerebellar ataxia [SCA], Study 2), and sub-clinical (autistic-like, Study 3) interpersonal disturbances. Collectively, these works aim to evaluate whether social-word processing deficits emerge selectively, whether they are dissociable from non-social semantics, and how they relate to neural systems underpinning social cognition. METHODS: Across studies, participants completed naturalistic discourse comprehension tasks involving matched social and non-social texts, followed by multiple-choice questionnaires targeting verb-related and circumstantial information. In Study 1, the task was completed by 20 bvFTD patients and 41 healthy controls. Behavioral performance was related to voxel-based morphometry and functional connectivity measures derived from fMRI and high-density EEG. In Study 2, the task was performed by 15 SCA patients and 29 controls. Structural MRI established the patients’ atrophy epicenter, and resting-state fMRI assessed cerebello-cortical functional connectivity, enabling brain–behavior correlations with social concept outcomes. In Study 3, the task was administered to 18 individuals with high and 18 with low autistic-like traits. Participants also completed tests of intelligence, working memory, vocabulary, and autism-related scales (ADOS-2), allowing assessment of cognitive covariates and correlations with social functioning. RESULTS: In Study 1, bvFTD patients exhibited selective deficits in social-text comprehension, associated with atrophy and altered connectivity in frontotemporal regions implicated in social cognition, alongside right frontotemporal electrophysiological hypoconnectivity. In Study 2, SCA patients also showed selective social-text comprehension impairments. Also, while controls exhibited significant correlations between social-text performance and cerebello-cortical connectivity (between the cerebellum and temporo-limbic regions, such associations were absent in patients. In Study 3, individuals with high autistic-like traits demonstrated selective deficits in social-text comprehension, independent of general cognitive abilities. Social-text performance also afforded robust subject-level classification in each group and correlated negatively with autism-related measures (including a social interaction index). DISCUSSION: These findings provide convergent multimodal evidence that social-word processing is selectively disrupted in populations with diminished or altered social experience. Across studies, impairments were consistently linked to disruptions in neural systems supporting social cognition (including frontotemporal and cerebello-cortical networks) and to validated indices of social engagement. These results extend embodied and situated accounts by suggesting that social concepts may be differentially grounded in interpersonal experience. Crucially, these deficits emerged in ecologically valid, discourse-level contexts, underscoring the importance of contextualized language for capturing the grounding of social semantics. Our paradigm, moreover, might be leveraged in clinical settings for capturing socio-cognitive disruptions beyond the limitations of traditional, context-blind, single-item instruments. Overall, this integrated framework illuminates how social words are grounded in the brain and behavior, prompting both theoretical refinements and translational applications.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Disorders: Acquired