The Brain Signature of Reward Processing During Cooperative Gaming

Human cooperation depends on shared goals and dynamic role-taking, aligning individual actions with goal-related tasks. However, in everyday social interactions, cooperation is often intertwined with personal goals and motivations. In this study, 48 young, healthy participants played the dyadic Pacman Game that incorporated a personal gamble to reflect these social dynamics. Brain oscillations and event-related potentials differentiated between achieving a shared goal enhanced by personal rewards and reaching a shared goal without a personal reward. Specifically, personal rewards, which had to be inferred from social cues rather than explicit feedback, were linked to increased delta/theta power and sustained positive ERP potentials over fronto-central regions. Furthermore, we replicated findings of alpha/beta power decreases and enhanced P3-like positivities associated with cognitive and semantic processing demands of specific player roles. Our results highlight how neural measures obtained in experimental games shed light on the interplay between shared goals and personal motivations, offering a valuable framework to bridge insights from controlled paradigms to real-world social cooperation.