Theory of Mind Is Impaired in Mild to Moderate Huntington’s Disease Independently from Global Cognitive Functioning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Affective "Theory of Mind" (ToM) is the specific ability to represent own and others' emotional states and feelings. Previous studies examined affective ToM ability in patients with Huntington's disease (HD), using the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes test" (RMET). Results were consistent in showing difficulties in inferring complex mental states from photographs of people even in the early stage of HD. However, there has been no agreement as to whether or not cognitive impairments in HD population might have contributed to poor performance on the RMET test. The aim of the present study was to assess whether the affective ToM ability was impaired in the mild to moderate stages of HD, and whether there was an association between compromised ToM ability and the presence of cognitive impairment. We evaluated ToM by means of RMET and global cognitive functioning by means of the MoCA questionnaire in 15 HD patients and 15 healthy subjects (HS). Both groups were matched for age and level of education. Our study showed that the ability to judge a person's mental states from a picture of their eyes was impaired in HD patients compared to normal population. Indeed, HD subjects gave the 34% of correct responses on RMET, whereas healthy control subjects' percentage of correct responses was 71%. Furthermore, this impairment was not correlated with global cognitive functioning except for the visuospatial task. These results show that RMET might represent a valid instrument to assess affective ToM ability in HD patients in the mild to moderate stages of the disease, independently from their cognitive status. Since it is known that HD patients, in addition to motor symptoms, suffer from cognitive deficits, including memory and executive impairments, it is important to have an instrument, which is not influenced by cognitive abilities. It is possible therefore to use RMET to assess important aspects of HD patients such as their ability to recognize others' emotions and feelings even when patients suffer from cognitive decline.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".