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The Role of the Mentalizing System in Novel Word Memory Across Neurotypical and Autistic Adults: a Functional Connectivity Approach
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Katherine Trice1, Zhenghan Qi1; 1Northeastern University
Mentalizing skills – computing others’ perspectives – are a gatekeeper for word learning in typically-developing (TD) individuals and a central aspect of autism (Tomasello, 2003; Kuhl, 2011; Baron-Cohen et al, 1985; Rosenthal et al, 2019). Behavioral word has showed that the mentalizing system can be leveraged for word retention in typical development – children and adults remember more words learned in situations requiring mentalizing than one-to-one meaning-mapping situations (Trice et al, 2023, 2025). Importantly, mentalizing skills predict better retention – not immediate mapping – suggesting that there may be a privileging of words learned via mentalizing in memory. This is supported by emerging behavioral and neuroimaging work in non-linguistic domains, which suggest the privileging of scenarios evoking mentalizing and similar socio-cognitive processes in memory consolidation and retention (Lin et al, 2019; Jimenez and Meyer 2024). However, this behavioral link for word retention has not been found in autistic individuals (Trice et al, in prep). With 60% of autistic children demonstrating language difficulties, including vocabulary, which don’t resolve with age, understanding if mentalizing in autism is a barrier or support for vocabulary growth is critical (Durrleman et al, 2015; Tager-Flusberg, 2011). But current neuroimaging work is limited on the role of the mentalizing system in word learning even in TD individuals, and the relationship between this and memory system is largely unexplored. Here, we aim to characterize the neural connection between mentalizing and memory in word learning and retention in autistic and TD adults. 20 TD and 20 autistic adults (currently, 8 and 12) will complete a word learning task in a MRI scanner. Novel words will be learned in three conditions – a direct mapping condition, in which there are only identical novel objects present and thus there is a clear one-to-one mapping between word and object; a lexical inference condition, in which two novel object of contrasting sizes are a present and the initial ambiguity of the intended referent can be resolved by the contrast of the object’s named size; a pragmatic inference condition, in which two identical and one unique novel objects are present and the intended referent can be resolved by correctly computing the speaker’s underlying beliefs and intent. Retention of all novel words will be tested 18 minutes later. A mentalizing localizer will identify group-constrained mentalizing parcels, from which subject-specific sub-parcels of the greatest activation will be extracted (Richardson et al, 2018). Subject-specific memory regions will extracted based on greatest activation for known over forgotten words in the medial prefrontal cortex, the prefrontal lobe, and hippocampus during retention. Task-based functional connectivity between mentalizing and memory region sub-parcels will be calculated for each condition and analyzed for relation to group, condition, and individual memory outcomes. Here, we hypothesize that the functional connectivity between the mentalizing and memory systems during word learning will be reduced in autistic adults, particularly when mentalizing is needed. Furthermore, in both groups, greater functional connectivity between mentalizing and memory will correlate with a memory advantage for words mapped via mentalizing.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Disorders: Developmental