Beyond the simplicity of theory of mind deficit in multiple sclerosis: from kinetic perception to socio-emotional abstraction and mentalizing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Theory of Mind (ToM) processing in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is still poorly understood due to the difficulty of most tasks in qualifying the mentalizing deficit net of cognitive load. METHODS: In this study, we administered the New False Belief Animation Task (NFBAT) to 50 MS and 33 healthy controls (HC) to investigate spontaneous mentalizing in ToM and goal-directed interactions. The global cognitive level was assessed by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). NFBAT appropriateness and intentionality scores were computed to investigate the ToM accuracy and intentionality attribution difficulties. NFBAT answers were qualitatively analyzed and categorized into kinetically and socially coherent/not coherent responses to test a low-level perceptual deficit. RESULTS: The main result showed dysfunctional mentalizing reasoning in MS compared to HC in the NFBAT Intentionality score in ToM conditions (p = 0.028, d = 0.501), while the two groups were equally proficient in mentalization accuracy. The Intentionality underperformance in MS was related to social low-level perceptual processing (β =0.06, p < 0.001) and visuospatial functions (β =0.05, p =0.002). A predictive role of memory and executive functions on NFBAT Intentionality scores was not observed. CONCLUSION: These results strengthen the hypothesis that ToM in MS is likely related to low-level social processing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".