Humans frequently interact with agents whose intentions can fluctuate between competition and cooperation over time. It is unclear how the brain adapts to fluctuating intentions of others when the nature of the interactions (to cooperate or compete) is not explicitly and truthfully signaled. Here, we use model-based fMRI and a task in which participants thought they were playing with another player. In fact, they played with an algorithm that alternated without signaling between cooperative and competitive strategies. We show that a neurocomputational mechanism with arbitration between competitive and cooperative experts outperforms other learning models in predicting choice behavior. At the brain level, the fMRI results show that the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex track the difference of reliability between these experts. When attributing competitive intentions, we find increased coupling between these regions and a network that distinguishes prediction errors related to competition and cooperation. These findings provide a neurocomputational account of how the brain arbitrates dynamically between cooperative and competitive intentions when making adaptive social decisions.
This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
Receiving a favor from another person may induce a negative feeling of indebtedness for the beneficiary. In this study, we explore these hidden costs by developing and validating a conceptual model of indebtedness across three studies that combine a large-scale online questionnaire, an interpersonal game, computational modeling, and neuroimaging. Our model captures how individuals perceive the altruistic and strategic intentions of the benefactor. These inferences produce distinct feelings of guilt and obligation that together comprise indebtedness and motivate reciprocity. Perceived altruistic intentions convey care and communal concern and are associated with activity in insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, while inferred strategic intentions convey expectations of future reciprocity and are associated with activation in temporal parietal junction and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. We further develop a neural utility model of indebtedness using multivariate patterns of brain activity that captures the tradeoff between these feelings and reliably predicts reciprocity behavior.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1848370
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10496108
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Key points Visual attention involves discrete multispectral oscillatory responses in visual and ‘higher‐order’ prefrontal cortices.
Prefrontal cortex laterality effects during visual selective attention are poorly characterized.
High‐definition transcranial direct current stimulation dynamically modulated right‐lateralized fronto‐visual theta oscillations compared to those observed in left fronto‐visual pathways.
Increased connectivity in right fronto‐visual networks after stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex resulted in faster task performance in the context of distractors.
Our findings show clear laterality effects in theta oscillatory activity along prefrontal–visual cortical pathways during visual selective attention.
Abstract Studies of visual attention have implicated oscillatory activity in the recognition, protection and temporal organization of attended representations in visual cortices. These studies have also shown that higher‐order regions such as the prefrontal cortex are critical to attentional processing, but far less is understood regarding prefrontal laterality differences in attention processing. To examine this, we selectively applied high‐definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD‐tDCS) to the left or right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). We predicted that HD‐tDCS of the left
versus right prefrontal cortex would differentially modulate performance on a visual selective attention task, and alter the underlying oscillatory network dynamics. Our randomized crossover design included 27 healthy adults that underwent three separate sessions of HD‐tDCS (sham, left DLPFC and right DLPFC) for 20 min. Following stimulation, participants completed an attention protocol during magnetoencephalography. The resulting oscillatory dynamics were imaged using beamforming, and peak task‐related neural activity was subjected to dynamic functional connectivity analyses to evaluate the impact of stimulation site (i.e. left and right DLPFC) on neural interactions. Our results indicated that HD‐tDCS over the left DLPFC differentially modulated right fronto‐visual functional connectivity within the theta band compared to HD‐tDCS of the right DLPFC and further, specifically modulated the oscillatory response for detecting targets among an array of distractors. Importantly, these findings provide network‐specific insight into the complex oscillatory mechanisms serving visual selective attention.
