Our study aims to contrast the neural temporal features of early stage of decision making in the context of risk and ambiguity. In monetary gambles under ambiguous or risky conditions, 12 participants were asked to make a decision to bet or not, with the event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded meantime. The proportion of choosing to bet in ambiguous condition was significantly lower than that in risky condition. An ERP component identified as P300 was found. The P300 amplitude elicited in risky condition was significantly larger than that in ambiguous condition. The lower bet rate in ambiguous condition and the smaller P300 amplitude elicited by ambiguous stimuli revealed that people showed much more aversion in the ambiguous condition than in the risky condition. The ERP results may suggest that decision making under ambiguity occupies higher working memory and recalls more past experience while decision making under risk mainly mobilizes attentional resources to calculate current information. These findings extended the current understanding of underlying mechanism for early assessment stage of decision making and explored the difference between the decision making under risk and ambiguity.

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This research examined whether uncertainty would modulate subjective anticipation during social interactions as it does in the non-social context, and further explored how response consistency between participants would influence one's anticipation. We set up an encyclopedic knowledge quiz involving two anonymous same-sex players and manipulated the difficulty of proposed questions (high-uncertainty accompanies highly difficult questions). An enlarged stimulus-preceding negativity was observed when participants were anticipating the presentation of their counterparts' responses to high-uncertainty questions (versus low-uncertainty ones), as well as when they were anticipating the display of correct answers to high-uncertainty questions after they found out that responses given by their partners were inconsistent (versus consistent) with their own. In addition, inconsistent responses gave rise to a more salient difference wave reward positivity and a more positive P300 during the feedback stage. Taken together, these results suggested that both uncertainty and inconsistency would enhance subjective anticipation of upcoming information during social interactions, and that inconsistency would strengthen one's concern and attention over outcomes.

We used dual electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity simultaneously in pairs of trustors and trustees playing a 15-round trust game framed as a "trust game" versus a "power game". Four major findings resulted: first, earnings in each round were higher in the trust than in the power game. Second, in the trust game, reaction time for strategic deliberations was significantly longer for the trustee than the trustor. In the power game, however, the trustee took longer to think about how much money to repay, whereas the trustor took longer to think about how much money to invest. Third, prediction accuracy for the amount exchanged was higher in the trust game than in the power game. Fourth, interbrain synchronicity gauged with the phase-locking value of alpha bands in the brainespecially the frontal and central regionswas higher in the power game than in the trust game. We infer that this last finding reflects elevated mutual strategic deliberation in the power game. These behavioral and neuroscience-based findings give a better understanding of the framing effects of a trust game on the strategic deliberations of both trustor and trustee seeking to attain wealth.

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