Mentalizing in an economic games context is associated with enhanced activation and connectivity in left temporoparietal junction.

Abstract

Studies in Social Neuroeconomics have consistently reported activation in social cognition regions during interactive economic games suggesting mentalizing during economic choice. Such mentalizing occurs during active participation of the game, as well as during passive observation of others' interactions. We designed a novel version of the classic false-belief task in which participants read vignettes about interactions between agents in the ultimatum and trust games and were subsequently asked to infer the agents' beliefs. We compared activation patterns during the economic-games false-belief task to those during the classic false-belief task using conjunction analyses. We find significant overlap in left TPJ, and dmPFC, as well as temporal pole during two task phases: belief formation and belief inference. Moreover, gPPI analyses show that during belief formation right TPJ is a target of both left TPJ and right temporal pole (TP) seed regions, while during belief inferences all seed regions show interconnectivity with each other. These results indicate that across different task types and phases, mentalizing is associated with activation and connectivity across central nodes of the social cognition network. Importantly, this is the case both for the novel economic-games and the classic false-belief tasks.