Using Brain-State Information to Facilitate Conditioned Attitude Formation
Abstract
Humans use facial features and emotional expressions to judge whether others can be trusted to engage in fair social and economic exchanges. These initial judgments can be changed via learning and are affected by the outcome of direct economic exchanges such as those modeled by laboratory trust games. Here, we used a modified repeated trust game in which participants viewed facial photographs of an investment partner (the Trustee), decided an amount to allocate to the Trustee for investment, and then learned the proportion of the investment gain the Trustee returned to the participant. These outcomes defined the partner as Trustworthy, Moderately Untrustworthy, or Untrustworthy. We examined whether a change in trustworthiness elicited a physiological arousal response, whether electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of attitude change previously identified in the literature could serve as markers of learned trustworthiness, and whether a data-driven multivariate machine learning approach to the EEG data could reveal biomarkers not previously identified in the literature. We also tested whether a second-order conditioning procedure in which Trustee photographs used in the repeated trust game (CS1 stimuli) were paired with novel photos (CS2 stimuli) changed attitudes toward the individuals represented in the CS2 stimuli and whether such putative changes in attitude also manifest in physiological measures. An initial EEG experiment (Exploratory experiment) provided data for an analysis of potential biomarkers of trust behavior.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 20, 2018
- Accession Number
- AD1054851
Entities
People
- Trevor B. Penney
Organizations
- National University of Singapore