Social Neuroimaging Meta-Analysis through the RDoC Lens Yields Distinct Context-Driven Cliques

Vancouver Convention Centre 

The ultimate goal of the NIMH's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) [1] is a multidimensional approach to precision medicine for psychiatry [2]. This includes a diagnostic system based on core criteria, yet the correspondence of RDoC domain definitions to existing neurobiological data has not been fully established. Evolution from an organizational framework to diagnostic implementation necessitates characterizing how RDoC domains map onto the healthy human brain. RDoC designates social processing as one of five domains of mental function, and is fractionated into four constructs (Fig. 1): affiliation and attachment, social communication, perception of self, and perception of others. Our present objective was to unpack these social processing constructs from a data-driven perspective in order to: (1) investigate the feasibility of neuroimaging task classification under RDoC domain definitions, (2) ascertain if the RDoC framework corresponds to different or overlapping social brain regions using brain meta-analysis, (3) evaluate the correspondence between the specialized function-structure relationships of the social brain across all domains of brain function and social task themes.