Hyperscanning Ultimatum

Game theory or the study of strategic decision making has been used to study and explain a wide variety of human and animal behaviors.

Summary

Game theory or the study of strategic decision making has been used to study and explain a wide variety of human and animal behaviors. One such game is the Ultimatum Game in which two players interact to decide how to divide a sum of money that is given to them. Most attempts to determine the neural underpinnings of the decision making in these games using fMRI has relied on scanning one individual while he/she plays either against a computer or another person outside the scanner. Both of these miss the opportunity to capture how both participants’ thought processing changes depending on the decisions of the other. Hyperscanning or jointly scanning both participants provides a mechanism for doing this. The first goal of this project is to modify an existing PsychoPy task designed for 1 person playing against the computer into one in which two versions of the task running on separate computers communicate the decisions of the two participants back-and-forth. The second goal will be to run this task using the scanners at Georgetown University and University of Maryland, College Park.

Contact

John VanMeter
wjwv5@georgetown.edu