Abstracts

Rationale: Multiple studies have demonstrated that persons with epilepsy (PWE) have impairments in a set of cognitive functions important in social interaction, collectively termed social cognition. Neural networks important for social cognition are broadly distributed, overlap with networks for other cognitive domains, and may be disrupted by focal lesions. The goal of this study was to understand how measures of social cognition related to measures of standard cognitive function and how performance is affected by epilepsy disease variables. Methods: We administered a video-based social cognitive battery (The Assessment of Social Inference Test, TASIT) and a measure of standard cognitive domains (Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status, RBANS) to 20 patients with focal epilepsy (temporal n=12, frontal n=8) and 16 age matched controls. We measured the impact of region of onset, age of onset, and duration of epilepsy on all cognitive measures. We calculated the correlation between performance on standard cognitive measures and measures of social cognition. Results: Significant differences were found between PWE and controls on all measures of standard cognitive domains (immediate memory p=0.03, language p<0.001, visuospatial/construction p=0.01, attention p<0.0001, and delayed memory p=0.01), as well as on measures of social cognition (emotional identification p=0.002; discrimination between sincerity and sarcasm p <0.001; discrimination between sarcasm and deception p < 0.0001). We found that