Abstract
The present study examined neural substrates underlying turn-based cooperation and competition in a real two-person situation. We simultaneously measured pairs of participants’ activations in their bilateral frontal, temporal, and parietal regions using a 96-channel near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system, when participants played a turn-taking disk-game on a computer. NIRS data demonstrated significant inter-brain neural synchronization (INS) across participant pairs’ right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in both the cooperation and competition conditions, and the competition condition also involved significant INS in the right inferior parietal lobule (IPL). In addition, competitive dyads’ INS in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) may play as a role of mediation in relationship between their empathy score and disk-manipulation latency, but cooperative dyads’ INS did not. These results suggest that first the right pSTS may be commonly involved in both cooperation and competition due to task demands of joint attention and intention understanding, while the right IPL may be more important for competition due to additional requirements of mentalizing resources in competing contexts. Second, participants’ empathy may promote INS in the bilateral IFG across competitors, and in turn affect their competitive performance.
Highlights
Turn-based interaction is a basic mode of human social behavior, in which people normally taking different roles perform complementary or opposing actions in a turn-taking style[1,2,3]
The empathy questionnaire consists of 28 items, assessing four aspects of the empathy trait: Perspective-taking (PT), Fantasy (F), Empathic Concern (EC), and Personal Distress (PD)
Because the present turn-taking diskgame requires participants to actively understand the partner’s actions and intentions, we mainly focused on regions of interest (ROIs) Hemisphere Channel F p ηp[2]
Summary
Turn-based interaction is a basic mode of human social behavior, in which people normally taking different roles perform complementary or opposing actions in a turn-taking style[1,2,3] (e.g., playing a chess game). Concerning concurrent competition, Cui et al.[9], using a near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) hyperscanning technique, measured participants’ prefrontal activations in www.nature.com/scientificreports/ Both cooperative and competitive interactions, when they performed a key-press task. In contrast to concurrent interaction, Liu and colleagues[1] in a NIRS-based hyperscanning study, demonstrated a significantly increased INS value in the right IFG only during competition, when participant pairs taking different roles played a turn-taking disk game. These inconsistent results between the concurrent and turn-based tasks may come from the different task requirements. In the concurrent competition by Cui et al.[9], interacting dyads’ behaviors were independent which would not lead to increase of the INS values
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