Social Cognition after Brain Injury
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The effects of a combined intervention targeting executive function and theory of mind on social inference in people with acquired brain injury
IRAS ID
248547
Contact name
Patrick Smith
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King’s College London
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
N/A, N/A
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 10 months, 31 days
Research summary
People with brain injuries acquired through stroke, a car accident or other brain illness, often experience difficulties with social cognition, meaning how they interpret, remember, and plan social situations. This can have a detrimental impact on their social relationships and in turn on their daily functioning and quality of life.
Executive functions are cognitive processes that enable us to flexibly plan and regulate our thoughts, behaviours and emotions. Social cognition and executive functions are supported by overlapping brain regions, so many people with social cognitive difficulties also have problems with executive cognitive functions.
Previous research has found that performance in executive cognitive tasks can be improved by a strategy called 'content free cueing.' Through the use of cues that carry no specific information about actions to be performed, but encourage recipients, via prior association, to think carefully about what they are doing. Within a one-session experiment, this study will test if content-free cueing can improve performance on a social cognition task.
We will do this by asking participants to complete a brief training session and then a social cognition task under two conditions, one with content-free cues and one with a control cue. Participants eligible to take part in the study will be (a) adults with (b) an acquired brain injury which occurred more than 6 months previously, (c) who are willing and able to take part in the 150-minute testing session, (d) have sufficient English language abilities, and (e) have an acquired difficulty seeing things from other people's perspective following their brain injury. They will be recruited from the Oliver Zangwill Centre for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation and the national brain injury charity Headway between November 2018 and October 2019.
If a beneficial effect of content-free cueing on social cognitive performance is identified, this may lead to the development of new or adapted rehabilitation interventions.
REC name
London - Riverside Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/LO/1762
Date of REC Opinion
9 Oct 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion