Neural Mechanisms of Belief Inference during Cooperative Games

Abstract

Humans have the arguably unique ability to understand the mental representations of others. For success in both competitive and cooperative interactions, however, this ability must be extended to include representations of others' belief about our intentions, their model about our belief about their intentions, and so on. We developed a "stag hunt" game in which human subjects interacted with a computerized agent using different degrees of sophistication (recursive inferences) and applied an ecologically valid computational model of dynamic belief inference. We show that rostral medial prefrontal (paracingulate) cortex, a brain region consistently identified in psychological tasks requiring mentalizing, has a specific role in encoding the uncertainty of inference about the other's strategy. In contrast, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex encodes the depth of recursion of the strategy being used, an index of executive sophistication. These findings reveal putative computational representations within prefrontal cortex regions, supporting the maintenance of cooperation in complex social decision making.

Medial prefrontal cortex and striatum mediate the influence of social comparison on the decision process

“…This finding is in accordance with the behavioral results: participants adjusted their choices to the choices of their counterpart, making choices that were likely to yield a relatively higher payoff compared with the other. Recent neuroimaging studies have suggested that the mPFC and other regions of the mentalizing network compute prediction errors of the expected behavior of others (24,25), the uncertainty about other's strategy (38), and the level of strategic reasoning in competitive games (39). Thus, we suggest that mPFC activity at choice in our experiment is related to the strategic and competitive component of the social context and not simply to the presence of the other player.…”

Vasopressin increases human risky cooperative behavior

“…However, previous work has shown that AVP administration increased cooperation following a cooperative gesture by one's partner in a repeated prisoner's dilemma (37), where cooperation might be mutually beneficial (38)-in line with the interdependent hypothesis (5). We believe that further investigation of AVP's role in social behavior would benefit from using computational theories that distinguish the different mechanism through which AVP may foster cooperative behavior in repeated interactions (35), particularly belief inference (33,36,39) and inferential limits in disorder (40).…”

Neural Correlates of Reinforcement Learning and Social Preferences in Competitive Bidding

“…Recently, a series of neuroimaging studies of social interactions have used depth of social reasoning (theory of mind) to describe individual differences in strategic behavior (Hampton et al, 2008;Coricelli and Nagel, 2009;Yoshida et al, 2010). In contrast to our study, these experiments have revealed an important role for the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex in social reasoning.…”