Self-Other Mergence in the Frontal Cortex during Cooperation and Competition

Abstract

SummaryTo survive, humans must estimate their own ability and the abilities of others. We found that, although people estimated their abilities on the basis of their own performance in a rational manner, their estimates of themselves were partly merged with the performance of others. Reciprocally, their ability estimates for others also reflected their own, as well as the others’, performance. Self-other mergence operated in a context-dependent manner: interacting with high or low performers, respectively, enhanced and diminished own ability estimates in cooperative contexts, but the opposite occurred in competitive contexts. Self-other mergence not only influenced subjective evaluations, it also affected how people subsequently objectively adjusted their performance. Perigenual anterior cingulate cortex tracked one’s own performance. Dorsomedial frontal area 9 tracked others’ performances, but also integrated contextual and self-related information. Self-other mergence increased with the strength of self and other representations in area 9, suggesting it carries interdependent representations of self and other.

Computations Underlying Social Hierarchy Learning: Distinct Neural Mechanisms for Updating and Representing Self-Relevant Information

“…Our results, therefore, align with several strands of research that have implicated a similar ventral region of the MPFC in the representation and processing of self-relevant information (Adolphs, 2009, Denny et al., 2012, Jenkins et al., 2008, Kelley et al., 2002, Kumaran and Maguire, 2005, Macrae et al., 2004, Mitchell et al., 2005, Mitchell et al., 2006, Mobbs et al., 2009, Ochsner et al., 2004, Tamir and Mitchell, 2011, Tamir and Mitchell, 2012, Wittmann et al., 2016). This evidence has come from a range of studies: experiments in which participants are asked to judge the applicability of traits to themselves compared with others (Denny et al., 2012, Kelley et al., 2002, Mitchell et al., 2006), work suggesting that items subjected to self-related processing are afforded privileged status in memory (Macrae et al., 2004), and research on constructing imagined scenarios involving either oneself or others (De Brigard et al., 2015, FeldmanHall et al., 2012, Hassabis et al., 2014, Schacter and Addis, 2007).…”

Distinct encoding of decision confidence in human medial prefrontal cortex

“…Evidence for the latter function comes from a recent study which showed that pgACC activity tracks a running average of subjects' performance history and predicts subjects' explicit evaluations of recent performance (30). Unlike our study in which performance was designed to be independent from one trial to another, performance was rigged such that it was auto-correlated across trials and thus could only be learnt from trial-by-trial feedback.…”

Not on my team: Medial prefrontal cortex responses to ingroup fusion and unfair monetary divisions

“…This raises the possibility that activity in response to others in this region may become more similar to self when interacting with ingroup members, and that this mergence is greater when an individual is highly fused to the group. Indeed, recent work has suggested that representation of self and other during reward‐related interactions may merge within areas 32 and 9 in the MPFC, particularly overlapping with the regions that were differentially engaged by fusion to a group in this study (Wittmann et al., 2016). Here, rather than mergence depending on the actions of the other person, we show that VMPFC responses are also influenced by one's fusion to a social group .…”