School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia.
Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Brain Imaging Behav. 2019 Jun;13(3):819-829. doi: 10.1007/s11682-018-9906-0.
Adults with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) often suffer poor social cognition. Social cognition is complex, requiring verbal, non-verbal, auditory, visual and affective input and integration. While damage to focal temporal and frontal areas has been implicated in disorders of social cognition after TBI, the role of white matter pathology has not been examined. In this study 17 adults with chronic, severe TBI and 17 control participants underwent structural MRI scans and Diffusion Tensor Imaging. The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) was used to assess their ability to understand emotional states, thoughts, intentions and conversational meaning in everyday exchanges. Track-based spatial statistics were used to perform voxelwise analysis of Fractional Anisotropy (FA) and Mean Diffusivity (MD) of white matter tracts associated with poor social cognitive performance. FA suggested a wide range of tracts were implicated in poor TASIT performance including tracts known to mediate, auditory localisation (planum temporale) communication between nonverbal and verbal processes in general (corpus callosum) and in memory in particular (fornix) as well as tracts and structures associated with semantics and verbal recall (left temporal lobe and hippocampus), multimodal processing and integration (thalamus, external capsule, cerebellum) and with social cognition (orbitofrontal cortex, frontopolar cortex, right temporal lobe). Even when controlling for non-social cognition, the corpus callosum, fornix, bilateral thalamus, right external capsule and right temporal lobe remained significant contributors to social cognitive performance. This study highlights the importance of loss of white matter connectivity in producing complex social information processing deficits after TBI.
患有严重创伤性脑损伤（TBI）的成年人通常患有较差的社会认知能力。社会认知是复杂的，需要言语、非言语、听觉、视觉和情感输入和整合。虽然损伤的焦点颞叶和额叶区域已经被牵连在 TBI 后的社会认知障碍，但白质病理学的作用尚未被研究。在这项研究中，17 名患有慢性、严重 TBI 的成年人和 17 名对照组参与者接受了结构 MRI 扫描和弥散张量成像。使用社会推理意识测试（TASIT）来评估他们在日常交流中理解情绪状态、思想、意图和会话意义的能力。基于轨迹的空间统计学被用来对白质束的分数各向异性（FA）和平均扩散系数（MD）进行体素分析，这些白质束与较差的社会认知表现有关。FA 表明，一系列广泛的束与较差的 TASIT 表现有关，包括介导听觉定位（颞叶平面）的束，以及一般的非言语和言语过程之间的沟通（胼胝体），特别是记忆（穹窿），以及与语义和言语回忆有关的束和结构（左颞叶和海马体）、多模态处理和整合（丘脑、外囊、小脑）以及社会认知（眶额皮层、额极皮层、右颞叶）。即使在控制非社会认知的情况下，胼胝体、穹窿、双侧丘脑、右外囊和右颞叶仍然是社会认知表现的重要贡献者。这项研究强调了白质连接丧失在产生 TBI 后复杂社会信息处理缺陷中的重要性。
