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Modeling and manipulating social percepts in individuals

Award Number: R01MH129648
ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH
OPDIV: NIH
AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY
AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS)
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 05/17/2022
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 03/31/2027

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Modeling and manipulating social percepts in individuals - PROJECT SUMMARY Biases in whether and how social interactions are perceived are a hallmark symptom of most major mental illnesses (e.g., people with autism tend to under-perceive social interactions, people with paranoid schizophrenia tend to over-perceive social interactions, and people with depression tend to perceive social interactions in a negative light). These biases likely reflect the extreme end of a continuum that exists in the normative population, suggesting that characterizing individual differences in social-perceptual styles is critical to furthering our understanding of disease. That humans are primed to perceive social interactions even in stripped-down, unlifelike stimuli (e.g., animations of geometric shapes) is a phenomenon that has long been recognized and exploited to study social cognition in both normative and patient populations. However, when it comes to these basic stimuli, while we may have the intuition that we “know it when we see it”, we do not understand what it is about stimuli deemed social that makes them social—in other words, which specific visual features are required, and in what doses. Furthermore, because task paradigms are often a simple binary choice (i.e., ‘social’ or ‘random’), we do not understand heterogeneity across individuals in terms of their thresholds for deciding if a given stimulus represents a social interaction, and if so, what kind of social interaction (i.e., positive or negative). A critical step toward understanding and correcting biased social cognition in mental illness is to define the fundamental sensory features of basic social interactions, and determine how and why different people compute differently on these features to give rise to different social percepts. This will open the door to interventions that can prevent an individual from going down a biased path. In this project, we will establish a social stimulus class for which we have precise, parametric control over low-level visual features. This will allow us to construct individual “social tuning curves” for various types of social interactions and determine how variability in these tuning curves relates to trait phenotypes. Combining these stimuli with simultaneous neuroimaging (fMRI) and eye-tracking will shed light on where in the processing hierarchy percepts diverge within and across individuals, and allow us to test the hypothesis that social percepts emerge earlier in the cortical hierarchy than previously thought. This would indicate that idiosyncratic social cognition is more closely linked to automatic, sensory-driven processes than controlled reflection, a distinction that is important for informing diagnostic and interventional tools. Finally, within a set of densely sampled individuals, we will directly test causality between stimulus features, brain activity, and percepts using real-time fMRI to implicitly steer individuals toward a given percept based on ongoing patterns of brain activity. The outcome of the proposed research will be a causal model of how stimulus features and brain dynamics interact to give rise to a given social percept within a given individual. This model will provide testable hypotheses regarding targeted therapies to normalize biased cognition in mental illnesses.


Issue Date FY	Funding FY	Legal Entity Name	Legal Entity Address	Legal Entity City	Legal Entity State	Legal Entity Zip Code	Legal Entity COUNTY	Legal Entity COUNTRY	Assistance Listing	Award Code	Budget Year	Action Date	Action Type	Action Amount

Issue Date FY: 2026 ( Subtotal = $733,072 )
2026	2026	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Mental Health Research Grants	000	5	5/18/2026	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$733,072
														Subtotal = $733,072

Issue Date FY: 2025 ( Subtotal = $835,987 )
2025	2025	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Mental Health Research Grants	001	3	4/14/2025	SUPPLEMENT FOR EXPANSION	$80,611
2025	2025	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Mental Health Research Grants	002	4	9/23/2025	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$113,306
2025	2025	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Mental Health Research Grants	000	4	4/11/2025	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$642,070
														Subtotal = $835,987

Issue Date FY: 2024 ( Subtotal = $767,661 )
2024	2024	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Mental Health Research Grants	000	3	3/21/2024	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$690,894
2024	2024	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Mental Health Research Grants	001	3	8/15/2024	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$76,767
														Subtotal = $767,661

Issue Date FY: 2023 ( Subtotal = $783,923 )
2023	2023	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Mental Health Research Grants	000	2	4/6/2023	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$783,923
														Subtotal = $783,923

Issue Date FY: 2022 ( Subtotal = $815,908 )
2022	2022	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Mental Health Research Grants	000	1	5/17/2022	NEW	$815,908
														Subtotal = $815,908

Grand Total All Awards = $3,936,551

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Modeling and manipulating social percepts in individuals

Award Number: R01MH129648

ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH

OPDIV: NIH

AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY

AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS)

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 05/17/2022

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 03/31/2027

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