In phase four we have achieved substantial progress on most work packages of the project, some of them being completed with two deliverables finished. We have performed behavioral and fMRI data analysis for the socially guided navigation task and finished scalp and intracranial EEG data collection on the same task. We presented the first preliminary results at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego (USA). These results show a differential grid intensity representation in the entorhinal cortex between social and non-social conditions. Cooperating in the social condition was found to lead to significantly better results on SSM tasks for the Romanian subject groups and steeper learning slopes in the Norwegian sample. Comparing self-navigation and observing navigation provides also exciting results at a functional level of gird activity in the entorhinal cortex. Our preliminary data points to an important impact of social presence on memory encoding. During phase four we started applying social spatial memory, social episodic memory, and social autobiographical memory tasks on elderly subjects. In the next phase, we will focus on applying the tasks with subjects at the early onset of cognitive decline with the objective of improving the quality of life of Alzheimer’s patients through virtual and direct theatre-inspired social interactions.
The project Social Transmission of Cognitive and Emotional States in the Care of Alzheimer’s Disease Patients” – STAD benefits from a 1.48 million € grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA and Norway Grants. The aim of the project is to to develop an intervention based on theater and drama therapy for diminishing memory loss and psychiatric symptoms, like anxiety, that manifest in Alzheimer’s disease. Project Promoter: National University of Theatre and Film „I. L. Caragiale” from Bucharest, Romania. Project Partner: Kavi Institute for System Neuroscience, NTNU, Todheim, Norway EEA-RO-NO-2018-0606 (Contract No7, May 31th 2019)