Research Review: Social cognition and everyday social skills in children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a meta-analysis of case-control studies.

Background: Previous studies that have assessed social cognition in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have produced inconsistent findings. To summarize these data and shed light upon moderators that may explain observed inconsistencies, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis exploring social cognition (Theory of Mind (ToM), Empathy, Facial and Non-Facial Emotion Recognition) and Everyday Social Skills in children and adolescents with ADHD.

Methods: The current meta-analysis involved 142 studies including 652 effect sizes.

Neural correlates of interoceptive accuracy: Beyond cardioception.

Interoceptive accuracy (IAc), the precision with which one assesses the signals arising from one's own body, is receiving increasing attention in the literature. IAc has mainly been approached as an individual trait and has been investigated through the cardiac modality using mostly non-ecological methods. Such studies consensually designate the anterior insular cortex as the main brain correlate of IAc.

Measuring Gaze and Arrow Cuing Effects With a Short Test Adapted to Brain Damaged Patients With Unilateral Spatial Neglect: A Preliminary Study.

People with left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) following a right brain lesion show difficulty in orienting their attention toward stimuli presented on the left. However, cuing the stimuli with gaze direction or a pointing arrow can help some of them to compensate for this difficulty. In order to build a tool that helps to identify these patients, we needed a short version of the paradigm classically used to test gaze and arow cuing effects in healthy adults, adapted to the capacities of patients with severe attention deficit.

Sensory Cueing of Autobiographical Memories in Normal Aging and Alzheimer's Disease: A Comparison Between Visual, Auditory, and Olfactory Information.

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic, neurodegenerative disease resulting in a progressive decline of autobiographical memories (AMs) which favors the development of psycho-behavioral disorders. One of the most popular psychosocial interventions in dementia care, Reminiscence Therapy, commonly uses sensory cueing to stimulate AMs retrieval. However, few empirical studies have investigated the impact of sensory stimulation on AMs retrieval in AD.

Diagnosing gaze and arrow cueing effects in unilateral spatial neglect.

Individuals with left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) following a right hemisphere lesion show difficulty in orienting their attention toward stimuli presented on the left. In normal cognition, others' gaze direction and a pointing arrow naturally guide visual attention. Here, we explore a method to identify patients who may benefit from these skills as a base for compensation during rehabilitation.

Investigating Eye Contact Effect on People's Name Retrieval in Normal Aging and in Alzheimer's Disease.

Difficulty in recalling people's name is one of the most universally experienced changes in old age and would also constitute one of the earliest symptom of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Direct gaze, i.e.

Social Contact Enhances Bodily Self-Awareness.

Human self-awareness is arguably the most important and revealing question of modern sciences. Converging theoretical perspectives link self-awareness and social abilities in human beings. In particular, mutual engagement during social interactions-or social contact-would boost self-awareness.

Eye contact effects on social preference and face recognition in normal ageing and in Alzheimer's disease.

Perceiving a direct gaze (i.e. another individual's gaze directed to the observer leading to eye contact) influences positively a wide range of cognitive processes.

Minimal group membership biases early neural processing of emotional expressions.

Mere affiliation with a social group alters people's perception of other individuals. One suggested mechanism behind such influence is that group membership triggers divergent visual facial representations for in-group and out-group members, which could constrain face processing. Here, using electroencephalography (EEG) under functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) during a group categorization task, we investigated the impact of mere affiliation to an arbitrary group on the processing of emotional faces.

Watching Eyes effects: When others meet the self.

The perception of direct gaze-that is, of another individual's gaze directed at the observer-is known to influence a wide range of cognitive processes and behaviors. We present a new theoretical proposal to provide a unified account of these effects. We argue that direct gaze first captures the beholder's attention and then triggers self-referential processing, i.

[Eye contact effects: A therapeutic issue?].

Introduction: The perception of a direct gaze - that is, of another individual's gaze directed at the observer that leads to eye contact - is known to influence a wide range of cognitive processes and behaviors. We stress that these effects mainly reflect positive impacts on human cognition and may thus be used as relevant tools for therapeutic purposes.

Objectives: In this review, we aim (1) to provide an exhaustive review of eye contact effects while discussing the limits of the dominant models used to explain these effects, (2) to illustrate the therapeutic potential of eye contact by targeting those pathologies that show both preserved gaze processing and deficits in one or several functions that are targeted by the eye contact effects, and (3) to propose concrete ways in which eye contact could be employed as a therapeutic tool.

Classification of autistic individuals and controls using cross-task characterization of fMRI activity.

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) has been applied successfully to task-based and resting-based fMRI recordings to investigate which neural markers distinguish individuals with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) from controls. While most studies have focused on brain connectivity during resting state episodes and regions of interest approaches (ROI), a wealth of task-based fMRI datasets have been acquired in these populations in the last decade. This calls for techniques that can leverage information not only from a single dataset, but from several existing datasets that might share some common features and biomarkers.

Social influence on metacognitive evaluations: The power of nonverbal cues.

Metacognitive evaluations refer to the processes by which people assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goal. Little is known about whether this process is susceptible to social influence. Here we investigate whether nonverbal social signals spontaneously influence metacognitive evaluations.

Source unreliability decreases but does not cancel the impact of social information on metacognitive evaluations.

Through metacognitive evaluations, individuals assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goals. We have previously shown that non-verbal social cues spontaneously influence these evaluations, even when the cues are unreliable. Here, we explore whether a belief about the reliability of the source can modulate this form of social impact.

Social decisions affect neural activity to perceived dynamic gaze.

Gaze direction, a cue of both social and spatial attention, is known to modulate early neural responses to faces e.g. N170.

Selective attention effects on early integration of social signals: same timing, modulated neural sources.

Humans combine co-emitted social signals to predict other's immediate intentions and prepare an adapted response. However, little is known about whether attending to only one of co-emitted social signals impacts on its combination with other signals. Here, using electroencephalography, we address selective attention effects on early combination of social signals.

Eye contact elicits bodily self-awareness in human adults.

Eye contact is a typical human behaviour known to impact concurrent or subsequent cognitive processing. In particular, it has been suggested that eye contact induces self-awareness, though this has never been formally proven. Here, we show that the perception of a face with a direct gaze (that establishes eye contact), as compared to either a face with averted gaze or a mere fixation cross, led adult participants to rate more accurately the intensity of their physiological reactions induced by emotional pictures.

Social affordances: is the mirror neuron system involved?

We question the idea that the mirror neuron system is the substrate of social affordances perception, and we suggest that most of the activity seen in the parietal and premotor cortex of the human brain is independent of mirroring activity as characterized in macaques, but rather reflects a process of one's own action specification in response to social signals.

Evidence for unintentional emotional contagion beyond dyads.

Little is known about the spread of emotions beyond dyads. Yet, it is of importance for explaining the emergence of crowd behaviors. Here, we experimentally addressed whether emotional homogeneity within a crowd might result from a cascade of local emotional transmissions where the perception of another's emotional expression produces, in the observer's face and body, sufficient information to allow for the transmission of the emotion to a third party.

Self-relevance appraisal influences facial reactions to emotional body expressions.

People display facial reactions when exposed to others' emotional expressions, but exactly what mechanism mediates these facial reactions remains a debated issue. In this study, we manipulated two critical perceptual features that contribute to determining the significance of others' emotional expressions: the direction of attention (toward or away from the observer) and the intensity of the emotional display. Electromyographic activity over the corrugator muscle was recorded while participants observed videos of neutral to angry body expressions.

Salient social cues are prioritized in autism spectrum disorders despite overall decrease in social attention.

Diminished social attention is often considered to be a central deficit in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). We further investigate this hypothesis by measuring the distracting power of social and non-social stimuli in the context of a Stroop task among children with ASD and typically developing controls (TDCs). Our results show that Stroop interference increases with social versus non-social distracters in TDCs, whereas the opposite pattern occurs in ASD.

Self-relevance appraisal of gaze direction and dynamic facial expressions: effects on facial electromyographic and autonomic reactions.

What processes or mechanisms mediate interpersonal matching of facial expressions remains a debated issue. As theoretical approaches to underlying processes (i.e.

Oscillatory Brain Correlates of Live Joint Attention: A Dual-EEG Study.

Joint attention consists in following another's gaze onto an environmental object, which leads to the alignment of both subjects' attention onto this object. It is a fundamental mechanism of non-verbal communication, and it is essential for dynamic, online, interindividual synchronization during interactions. Here we aimed at investigating the oscillatory brain correlates of joint attention in a face-to-face paradigm where dyads of participants dynamically oriented their attention toward the same or different objects during joint and no-joint attention periods respectively.

Early binding of gaze, gesture, and emotion: neural time course and correlates.

Communicative intentions are transmitted by many perceptual cues, including gaze direction, body gesture, and facial expressions. However, little is known about how these visual social cues are integrated over time in the brain and, notably, whether this binding occurs in the emotional or the motor system. By coupling magnetic resonance and electroencephalography imaging in humans, we were able to show that, 200 ms after stimulus onset, the premotor cortex integrated gaze, gesture, and emotion displayed by a congener.