Understanding Socio-Behavioral Changes in Adolescents with Traumatic Brain Injury Using FMRI

Blessy Mathew¹, Evan Goldstein², Mark J. Lowe¹, Angela Ciccia³

In this study we focus on the impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on social cognition, attention, memory, and executive functioning in adolescents. We used fMRI to identify patterns of activation in adolescents with and without TBI during a social cognitive task, and to correlate specific brain regions with performance on memory measures. We observed significant differences in whole brain activated voxels in questions requiring least social inference in controls with patients (requiring least social inference state (p=0.032), and most difficult (p=0.017)). In a whole brain correlation map with memory index (p<0.025), TBI patients recruited different regions than controls.