Investigating the Cognitive Processes That Underlie Social Knowledge and Behavior

Objective

The purpose of the protocol is to localize the neural regions and systems mediating the
forms of knowledge representations hypothesized by the principal investigator to be stored
in the human prefrontal cortex. We suspect that political attitudes can also be viewed as a
type of stored knowledge. Utilizing a variety of experimental neuropsychological tasks
during functional MRI, we will investigate hypotheses regarding the role of the dorsolateral
and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in social cognition and emotional processing. We will
ascertain the relationship between so-called cold cognition such as event knowledge and hot
social cognition such as attitude formation and specific brain regions within the prefrontal
cortex.

Study Population

Normal adult volunteers will participate in experiments dealing with processing of event
knowledge, general attitudes, political stereotypes and attitudes, using fMRI.

Design

All the experiments will employ within-subject event-related fMRI design to determine
whether activations of different cortical areas correspond to different kind of stored
knowledge.

Outcome Measures

The data that we collect in this protocol will consist of fMRI activation images
corresponding to varying neuropsychological tasks. The will be of value in (1) identifying
a set of neural regions and distributed networks mediating the forms of knowledge
representation stored in the prefrontal cortex and (2) developing functional MRI screening
measures for subjects at-risk for developing a neurological disorder.