Disrupted activation of dot perspective task-related EEG generators in forensic patients with borderline personality disorder
摘要
Altercentric and egocentric biases (AB, EB) refer to the impact of another agent’s/own perspective on the speed with which one can report one’s own/another visual perspective respectively. These biases are known to be affected by illnesses and in particular borderline personality (BPD). Coupling the dot-perspective taking task with high-density EEG recordings at the surface and in the inverse space, we analyzed the regional distribution of neural generators related to AB and EB in healthy controls (n = 24) and forensic BPD male patients (n = 14) making comparisons with previous functional MRI data obtained with the same experimental design. In both controls and BPD cases, AB was associated with early EEG activations of visual association areas. In contrast, EB was related to increased use of neural sources in salience, mentalizing networks and mirror neuron areas bilaterally. In forensic BPD patients, no statistically significant differential activation of neural generators was observed in respect to this variable. Our preliminary findings in a small sample of BPD patients show that unlike fMRI observations that pointed to an AB-related widespread increase of BOLD signal in central executive and mentalizing areas, this was not the case at the level of neural generators. Paralleling previous fMRI data, EB was related to increased need of activation of neural sources in visual association areas and later on in several networks involved in social cognition. Such activation was not observed in forensic BPD cases supporting the hypothesis of a decreased ability of these patients in mobilizing their brain resources when treating the Self-Other discrepancy. However, the limited statistical power and post-hoc group-level interaction analysis point to the need for further confirmatory analyses of these first experimental evidences.