Social learning deficits in frontotemporal dementia

GONZALEZ GADEA, MARÍA LUZ; GARCÍA ADOLFO M.; IBÁÑEZ, AGUSTÍN; ABREVAYA, SOFÍA; ALARCO, SOFÍA; SEDEÑO, LUCAS; FITTIPALDI, SOL; MANES, FACUNDO

Chicago

Conferencia; 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience; 2019

Society for Neuroscience

Previous studies have shown that social reinforcement is a potential facilitator of human learning. This integration between memories and social contextual information, named social learning, is critical to maintain and promote interpersonal interactions and bonds. A relevant lesion model to explore this phenomenon is afforded by the behavioral variant of the frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), which is characterized by a relative spared episodic memory profile alongside insidious changes in behavior, decline in social and emotional conduct, and deficits in the integration of contextual information. Yet, there is scant evidence on how social cues modulate the behavioral and neural correlates of learning in this disease. To bridge this gap, we obtained high-density EEG measures from 14 bvFTD patients and 27 demographically matched healthy controls as they performed a task that tracks the effects of social and non-social reinforcers during the implicit learning of arbitrary associations between letters and numbers. We analyzed two relevant event-related potentials: the N170, which reflects early perceptual processes involving the structural encoding of faces; and the feedback error-related negativity (fERN), which is modulated after high-conflict responses during decision-making and encodes social rejection and explicit social expectancy violations. We also administered the mini-Social cognition & Emotional Assessment to control for the effects of basic emotional recognition. Results showed that social reinforcement significantly improved learning and increased fERN modulation in controls, but no such patterns were observed in the bvFTD group. Also, the groups did not differ in their capacity to recognize basic emotions and N170 modulations showed no disparities between conditions or groups. Taken together, these results suggest that bvFTD may involve specific alterations in the integration of social information to reinforce learning, and that this impairment is not secondary to primary deficits in processing of facial emotional stimuli and basic emotional recognition.