When decisions of others matter to me: an electrophysiological analysis

BMC Neuroscience

Research Article

Josep Marco-Pallarés¹  Saskia Strehl²  Ulrike M Krämer²  Andrea Schröder²  Thomas F Münte³ 

[1] Department of Basic Psychology, University of Barcelona, Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035, Barcelona, Spain;Institut d'Investigacions Biomèdiques de Bellvitge (IDIBELL), Feixa Llarga s.n., L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, 08907, Spain;Dept. of Neuropsychology, Otto von Guericke University, Universitätsplatz 2, Gebäude 24, 39106, Magdeburg, Germany;Dept. of Neuropsychology, Otto von Guericke University, Universitätsplatz 2, Gebäude 24, 39106, Magdeburg, Germany;Dept. of Neuropsychology, Otto von Guericke University, Universitätsplatz 2, Gebäude 24, 39106, Magdeburg, Germany;Dept of Neurology, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23538, Lübeck, Germany;

关键词: Neutral Condition;    Parallel Condition;    Mirror Neuron;    Reverse Condition;    Gambling Task;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2202-11-86

 received in 2009-10-31, accepted in 2010-07-29,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundActions of others may have immediate consequences for oneself. We probed the neural responses associated with the observation of another person's action using event-related potentials in a modified gambling task. In this task a "performer" bet either a higher or lower number and could win or lose this amount. Three different groups of "observers" were also studied. The first (neutral) group simply observed the performer's action, which had no consequences for the observers. In the second (parallel) group, wins/losses of the performer were paralleled by similar wins and losses by the observer. In the third (reverse) group, wins of the performer led to a loss of the observer and vice versa.ResultsERPs of the performers showed a mediofrontal feedback related negativity (FRN) to losses. The neutral and parallel observer groups did similarly show an FRN response to the performer's losses with a topography indistinguishable from that seen in the performers. In the reverse group, however, the FRN occurred for wins of the performer which translated to losses for the observer.ConclusionsTaking into account previous experiments, we suggest that the FRN response in observers is driven by two evaluative processes (a) related to the benefit/loss for oneself and (b) related to the benefit/loss of another person.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Marco-Pallarés et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.