A fMRI investigation: competition and interpersonal interaction in a Tetris game
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Huang, Yun-An
Abstract
Competition involves rewarding, decision making (Engelmann et al., 2009; Hewig et al., 2009; Kuo et al., 2009), and interpersonal interaction (Krach et al., 2008). In this study, two novel manipulations were used to further study competition through a real-time competitive game. First, the participant did not know whether the opponent was a human being or a computer during the game. Second, punishment was added to strengthen the interaction with an opponent. Under such an implicit circumstance, participants’ behavioral responses and brain activations were collected to examine the neural correlates of mental processing, including rewarding, decision making and interpreting opponent’s intention.
Twenty-one right handed healthy volunteers participated in this study. This study used a two-by-two design. The first factor was “competition”. The competition (or non-competition) was referred to a situation that the opponent could punish (or could not punish) the participant by adding rows to the participant’s screen during the Tetris game, vice versa. The second factor was “Opponent” referring to whether the participant confronted with either a human opponent or a computer opponent. Thus, there were primary contrasts in our design, “competition versus non-competition”, and “human opponent versus computer opponent”. In addition, the punishing events occurred in the competition condition but not non-competition condition. Hence, the third contrast was “punishing the opponent versus being punished by the opponent”. The computer opponent was an artificial intelligence program to play automatically the Tetris game. In an event related fMRI design, all participants’ responses were recorded.
The contrast of competition versus non-competition produced greater activation in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (BA 32), inferior parietal lobule (BA 40), and dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (BA 10). In the contrast of “human opponent versus computer opponent”, signal intensity at right inferior parietal lobule was correlated with the level of the participant playing in the game. Moreover, participants were split into higher level and lower level players. For the higher level players, the contrast of human opponent versus computer opponent produced greater activation at the right inferior parietal lobule (BA 40). The contrast of “punishing the opponent versus being punished by the opponent” produced greater activation in dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (BA 10), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (BA 32), orbital frontal cortex (BA 47) and striatum.
The result showed that interpreting opponent’s intention and rewarding were involved in the competitive Tetris game. Right inferior parietal lobule (IPL, BA 40) were related to perceive the intentional action (Krach et al., 2008). Frontal lobe including dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, BA 46, 10), orbital frontal cortex (OFC, BA 47), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC, BA 24, 32), and striatum were related to rewarding (Haber, 2009). Under an implicit circumstance, participants with higher playing level engaged more competing behavior associated with greater activation in right-inferior parietal lobule (IPL, BA 40) when competing with a strategic and flexible human opponent.
Subjects
functional magnetic resonance imaging
competition
social interaction
rewarding
decision making
intention
Tetris
SDGs
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-99-R96945002-1.pdf
Size
23.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):7b894366d662302e60c01268e38253a3