Medical Student Research Forum Posters

The Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to assign mental states to oneself and others. The development of this social cognitive ability is a major issue in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Although we understand what the impairment consists of on a psychological level, how and why this deficit manifests on a physiologic level remains elusive. Current treatment of the ASD remains primarily psychological with a heavy emphasis on behavioral therapy. A deeper understanding of the neurophysiologic mechanisms and neural networking in ToM cognition can bring us closer to adapting neuromodulatory advancements for the treatment of behavioral deficits in ASD.

The majority of physiologic research in ToM comes from neural imaging, namely fMRI. These fMRI studies point to the temporal parietal junction (TPJ), the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex (ACC/PCC) as primary components of ToM networking. The downfall of fMRI data is the poor spatial resolution. Intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) has the ability of providing unrivalled temporal resolution of neurological data because the electrodes are recording directly from the surface of the brain. Due to the invasive nature of this approach, this is not a common way to obtain neural recordings of cognitive processes.