Speaking with virtual humans: Assessing social cognition in traumatic brain injury with a second-person perspective task.

Abstract

This study is one of the first to investigate social cognition in participants with traumatic brain injury (TBI) using a task that actively engaged the participant in a real interaction with a partner. Previous results have reported altered social cognition in TBI patients, but social cognition was mostly assessed through traditional tasks involving conscious and deliberate reasoning about characters' mental states (i.e., a third-person perspective). Our goal was to present a new paradigm which allowed the assessment of social cognition in conditions closer to real life meaning that participants were actively engaged in an interaction (i.e., second-person perspective) in order to capture more implicit use of social cognition processes. This study used three tasks to evaluate social cognition. We designed a task, called EVICog, in which participants were engaged in real audio-visual conversations with two virtual humans who expressed emotions and produced speech content that required the participants to make inferences about the characters' mental states. The two other tasks are standard in the literature; they use photographs to test participants' recognition of emotions and short comic strips to test their attribution of intentions. Our results showed that TBI participants presented a significant deficit of social cognition compared to control participants. The ROC analysis showed that EVICog has a high discrimination power compared to the other tests. These results further confirm that social cognition is altered in TBI participants even in real interactions and further support the use of ecological settings to investigate social cognition.