Graduate student Rupa Gupta was in shock. Her faculty mentor Dan Tranel couldn’t believe his eyes.

Gupta, a Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Interdisciplinary Graduate Program, received a perfect 1.0 score on her National Research Service Award grant application from the National Institutes of Health.

“Fifteen people are normally on the review committee and to average a perfect score means no one gave it anything less than a 1.0 score, which is unbelievable,” Tranel said. “This happens virtually never.”

Gupta is using the grant to investigate the effects of damage to the brain’s prefrontal cortex on social interaction and communication. To do this, she is studying seven patients in the Iowa Neurological Patient Registry. In the first part of her research, she examined verbal communication by observing the behavior of two people – a study participant and a University of Iowa research assistant – during a conversation.

In the interactions between these two non-brain-damaged people, Gupta observed that as their conversation began the study participant produced a lot more words than the research assistant. But by the end of the conversation, both people were producing relatively equal numbers of words in each turn they took, suggesting that they were having a back-and-forth conversation.

In contrast, when a registry patient interacted with the research assistant, the registry patient produced more words than the researcher in the beginning of the conversation, but continued to produce more words at the end.

“This suggests that the registry patient is dominating the conversation. This might be indicative of some of those problems that the registry patients’ families are reporting they’re having in developing a rapport with other people,” Gupta said. “There’s a lot of research in the autism literature showing that those people have breakdowns in these same areas, especially in developing a rapport with other people and developing these social interactions, and the work done here with registry patients helps us better understand the brain areas involved in these problems.

“We’re trying to understand better what’s going wrong in order to help make things better by providing people with social interaction skills.”

Autism is a disorder of neurological development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior.

Gupta presented her research at the Clinical Aphasiology Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in June. The conference deals with the effects of brain injury on communication. She plans to submit this work as a research paper for publication in the fall.

The final component of her research deals with non-verbal aspects of communication – such as head nods or the timing of speech – and how they change after brain damage occurs.

“The hope is you could potentially teach people some compensation skills such as how mimicking someone’s posture might make the interaction more fruitful,” Gupta said. “This could help these people build relationships.”