Deepa Purushothaman
Hello everyone,
My name is Deepa, and I am excited to introduce to you our team’s research. We are poster number M73: Atypical neural activation during live face gaze in First Episode Psychosis predicts Bureau of Labor Statistics classification. I am a post doc at Yale, and we are a collaborative project by the Hirsch lab and STEP program at Yale. So, let me take you to the first slide.
So, have you ever wondered how we instinctively look at people’s face, especially eyes, when you are talking to them? So, eye gaze and facial expressions tell us a lot of things about people’s emotions, even when they are not talking. So that’s why eye gaze and facial expression processing is considered the core of social cognition. And we know that in Schizophrenia, these core social cognitive processes are impaired. But how do we test them? So, imagine I need to test the motor circuits necessary for riding a bike. So, these will not be completely engaged, the circuits will not be completely engaged unless I sit on a bike and start riding. Similarly, the social cognitive circuits will not be completely engaged unless I see another human being face to face and start communicating with him or her. So, seeing movie clips or seeing static images may help us in understanding the neurology but it will not completely engage the social cognitive circuit. So, this is a challenge we all face. This was our research question: How do we bring a real world social dynamic interaction into the lab? And this is something I am excited to discuss with you at SIRS.
At Hirsch lab, we came across , we put forward or we discovered a unique paradigm which includes two people, natural facial expressions and live eye gaze. It’s essentially two-person neuroscience, and what we did was, we compared people with First Episode Psychosis from the STEP clinic with typically developing individuals who do not have any neurodevelopmental, neurologic or psychiatric conditions. And while they are doing the task, we did FNIRS. And we had some amazing findings , interesting findings. I am excited to talk to you about all those things at SIRS. But I can only say that these findings could have immense ecological validity, treatment implications and it could even be a biological marker. So, let’s meet at SIRS.
