Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item THE ROLE OF THEORY OF MIND IN SOCIAL INTERACTION(2021) Alkire, Diana; Redcay, Elizabeth; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Theory of mind (ToM) is assumed to be instrumental to social interactions, yet it is typically studied using non-interactive laboratory tasks. Standard measures are thus limited in their ability to characterize the cognitive and neural substrates of ToM in naturalistic social interactions, as well as the mechanisms explaining social-interactive difficulties in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Across three studies, this dissertation aimed to highlight and bridge the disconnect between the study of ToM and its real-world implementation. Study 1 assessed the relative importance of a range of social-cognitive, social-perceptual, and social-affective constructs in explaining variance in the social symptoms of ASD. Three standard, non-interactive ToM measures together explained only 6% of the variance in social symptoms, reinforcing the need for interactive approaches to studying ToM. Study 2 applied such an approach using a socially interactive neuroimaging paradigm to measure brain activation associated with both ToM and social interaction. In typically developing children aged 8-12, interacting with a peer, even in the absence of explicit ToM demands, engaged many of the same regions as did non-interactive ToM reasoning, consistent with the idea that social interaction elicits spontaneous ToM-related processes. Study 3 also investigated ToM in social interaction, this time at the behavioral level, by introducing a novel observational coding system that measures the use of (or failure to use) ToM in naturalistic conversation. Among dyads of typically developing and autistic children and adolescents, conversational ToM (cToM) did not predict interaction success. However, the cToM Negative subscale—capturing ToM-related violations of conversational norms—was negatively associated with two forms of non-interactive ToM: 1) recognizing complex emotions from facial expressions, and 2) spontaneously attributing mental states when describing abstract social animations. Furthermore, exploratory analyses revealed associations between cToM and brain activation during the socially interactive neuroimaging task used in Study 2. Findings across the three studies highlight the multifaceted nature of the ToM construct, the value of socially interactive approaches to studying ToM, and the importance of considering ToM alongside other social-cognitive and affective processes when investigating social interaction.Item Developmental Neural Correlates of Social Interaction(2016) Rice, Katherine Ann; Redcay, Elizabeth; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Children develop in a sea of reciprocal social interaction, but their brain development is predominately studied in non-interactive contexts (e.g., viewing photographs of faces). This dissertation investigated how the developing brain supports social interaction. Specifically, novel paradigms were used to target two facets of social experience—social communication and social motivation—across three studies in children and adults. In Study 1, adults listened to short vignettes—which contained no social information—that they believed to be either prerecorded or presented over an audio-feed by a live social partner. Simply believing that speech was from a live social partner increased activation in the brain’s mentalizing network—a network involved in thinking about others’ thoughts. Study 2 extended this paradigm to middle childhood, a time of increasing social competence and social network complexity, as well as structural and functional social brain development. Results showed that, as in adults, regions of the mentalizing network were engaged by live speech. Taken together, these findings indicate that the mentalizing network may support the processing of interactive communicative cues across development. Given this established importance of social-interactive context, Study 3 examined children’s social motivation when they believed they were engaged in a computer-based chat with a peer. Children initiated interaction via sharing information about their likes and hobbies and received responses from the peer. Compared to a non-social control, in which children chatted with a computer, peer interaction increased activation in mentalizing regions and reward circuitry. Further, within mentalizing regions, responsivity to the peer increased with age. Thus, across all three studies, social cognitive regions associated with mentalizing supported real-time social interaction. In contrast, the specific social context appeared to influence both reward circuitry involvement and age-related changes in neural activity. Future studies should continue to examine how the brain supports interaction across varied real-world social contexts. In addition to illuminating typical development, understanding the neural bases of interaction will offer insight into social disabilities such as autism, where social difficulties are often most acute in interactive situations. Ultimately, to best capture human experience, social neuroscience ought to be embedded in the social world.