RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Mentalizing in an economic games context is associated with enhanced activation and connectivity in left temporoparietal junction
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2022.02.12.480201
DO 10.1101/2022.02.12.480201
A1 Li-Ang Chang
A1 Lotte Warns
A1 Konstantinos Armaos
A1 Ava Q. Ma de Sousa
A1 Femke Paauwe
A1 Christin Scholz
A1 Jan B. Engelmann
YR 2022
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/04/15/2022.02.12.480201.abstract
AB Studies in Social Neuroeconomics have consistently reported activation in social cognition regions during interactive economic games suggesting mentalizing during economic choice. It remains important to test the involvement of neural activity associated with mentalizing in an economic games context within the same sample of participants performing the same task. We designed a novel version of the classic false-belief task in which participants observed 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 in the context of the novel economic-games and classic false-belief tasks.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.