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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on September 27, 2008
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2008 3(4):367-376; doi:10.1093/scan/nsn032
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Do you make a difference? Social context in a betting task

Norberto Eiji Nawa1,2, Eric E. Nelson3, Daniel S. Pine3 and Monique Ernst3

1ATR Cognitive Information Science Research Labs, 2Multimodal Communication Group, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 2-2-2 Hikari-dai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan, and 3Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program, Department of Health and Human Services, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, 15K North Drive, Bethesda MD 20892-2670, USA

Social context strongly influences human motivated behavior. The triadic model implicates three major nodes in the regulation of motivated behavior, i.e. amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and striatum. The present work examines how social context modulates this system. Nineteen healthy subjects completed an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study of a monetary betting task in the presence (social trials) and in the absence of a social peer (nonsocial trials). In the social trials, the scanned subject played along with another subject, although their performances were independent from one another. In the nonsocial trials the scanned subject played alone. Although behavioral performance did not differ between social and nonsocial trials, BOLD signal changes during betting were significantly greater in the amygdala bilaterally and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA 9) in the social condition relative to the nonsocial condition. In contrast, activation was greater in ventral striatum in the nonsocial condition relative to the social condition. These findings suggest that social context modulates the triadic neural-systems ensemble to adjust motivated behavior to the unique demands associated with the presence of conspecifics.

Keywords: amygdala; ventral striatum; BA 9; decision-making; social context

Correspondence should be addressed to Norberto Eiji Nawa, PhD, ATR Cognitive Information Science Labs, 2-2-2 Hikari-dai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan. E-mail: eiji{at}atr.jp.

Received September 20, 2007. Accepted August 19, 2008.


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