Social-cue perception and mentalizing ability following traumatic brain injury: A human-robot interaction study

ABSTRACT

Primary Objective: Research studies and clinical observations of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) indicate marked deficits in mentalizing—perceiving social information and integrating it into judgements about the affective and mental states of others. The current study investigates social-cognitive mechanisms that underlie mentalizing ability to advance our understanding of social consequences of TBI and inform the development of more effective clinical interventions.

Research Design: The study followed a mixed-design experiment, manipulating the presence of a mentalizing gaze cue across trials and participant population (TBI vs. healthy comparisons).

Methods and Procedures: Participants, 153 adults, 74 with moderate-severe TBI and 79 demographically matched healthy comparison peers, were asked to judge a humanoid robot’s mental state based on precisely controlled gaze cues presented by the robot and apply those judgements to respond accurately on the experimental task.

Main Outcomes and Results: Results showed that, contrary to our hypothesis, the social cues improved task performance in the TBI group but not the healthy comparison group.

Conclusions: Results provide evidence that, in specific contexts, individuals with TBI can perceive, correctly recognize, and integrate dynamic gaze cues and motivate further research to understand why this ability may not translate to day-to-day social interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Mentalizing
• Theory of Mind (ToM)
• social cognition
• gaze cueing
• human-robot interaction

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr Erica Richmond and staff and students in the Mutlu, Turkstra and Duff labs for work on data collection and management.

Disclosure Statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research [R01 HD071089];National Institute of General Medical Sciences [R25GMO83252];

Notes on contributors

Bilge Mutlu

Dr. Bilge Mutlu is an associate professor of computer science, the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and the co-director of the Collaborative Robotics Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research investigates the design of robotic technologies for human use and their integration into day-to-day environments as applications that offer social and physical assistance.

Melissa Duff

Dr. Melissa Duff is an associate professor of hearing and speech sciences, the director of the Communication and Memory Laboratory, and the founder and director of the Brain Injury Registry at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on the role of memory in language and social interaction and on the identification of biological, cognitive, and environmental factors that influence long-term outcomes following traumatic brain injury.

Lyn Turkstra

Dr. Lyn Turkstra is a professor of speech-language pathology and assistant dean at the School of Rehabilitation Sciences at McMaster University. Her research and clinical work focuses on the links between cognitive function and social communication in individuals with acquired brain injury and on the development of evidence-informed practice standards to translate research findings into improved clinical practice.