ABSTRACT
RESUMO

First and third-person paradigms for second-person disorders:

Neurocognitive approaches to behavioral neurology

Adolfo M. Garcia

UdeSA, Argentina 
USACH, Chile
UCSF, USA

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Multiple neurodegenerative diseases are typified by alterations in social conduct, as the
patient (from her perspective, an ‘I’) fails to engage in successful interactions with another person (from her perspective, a ‘you’). Accordingly, these diseases can be conceptualized as second-person disorders. Typically, however, their assessment hinges on first- and third-person paradigms, requiring participants to appraise their own socio-affective states (e.g.,“How do you feel about…?”) or those of third parties (e.g., “What is he feeling…?”). I will introduce novel developments in this framework and discuss their achievements, limitations, and challenges. Evidence will be considered from three relevant conditions (behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, Huntington’s disease, and cerebellar ataxia), spanning diverse tasks (facial emotion recognition, moral emotion gradation, social event comprehension) and methodological approaches (behavioral, neuroanatomical, hemodynamic, electrophysiological measures). I will identify the main theoretical and translational contributions of this tradition, and then use it to prompt non-trivial questions: Do these findings illuminate second-person experiences? Can second-person experiences be reported as such unless the addressee is the second person in question? Are vicarious social cognition tasks second-order windows into second-person experiences? These queries, I hope, will promote epistemological and methodological reconsiderations of substantial research lines in behavioral neurology and cognitive neuroscience.