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

Abstract

Prior 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 in the game, as well as during passive observation of others' interactions. We designed a novel version of the classic false-belief task (FBT) 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 FBT to those during the classic FBT using conjunction analyses. We find significant overlap in the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, as well as the temporal pole (TP) during two task phases: belief formation and belief inference. Moreover, generalized Psychophysiological Interaction (gPPI) analyses show that during belief formation, the right TPJ is a target of both the left TPJ and the right TP seed regions, whereas 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 for both the novel economic games and the classic FBTs.