ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2025
Neural decoding of competitive decision-making in Rock-Paper-Scissors.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Context shapes action understanding in social interactions.iScience · 2026Article
- Collaborative rule learning promotes interbrain information alignment.PLoS biology · 2025Article
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8 authors.
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Abstract
Social interactions are fundamental to daily life, yet social neuroscience research has often studied individuals' brains in isolation. Hyperscanning, the simultaneous recording of neural data from multiple participants, enables real-time investigation of social processes by examining multiple brains while they interact. Previous hyperscanning research has largely focused on cooperative tasks, with fewer studies examining competitive contexts. Here, we obtained electroencephalography (EEG) hyperscanning data from 62 participants (31 pairs) who played a computerised version of the Rock-Paper-Scissors game, a classic paradigm for studying competitive decision-making. Although the optimal strategy is to be unpredictable and thus act randomly, participants exhibited behavioural biases, deviating from this ideal. Using multivariate decoding methods to measure neural representations within the two players' brains in interaction, we found information about decisions made by participants during gameplay, revealing certain strategies. Notably, losers uniquely represented information about prior trials, suggesting this may impair optimal performance. These results reveal how competitive decision-making is shaped by cognitive biases and previous outcomes, highlighting the difficulty of achieving randomness in strategic contexts. This work advances our understanding of decision-making and cognitive dynamics in competitive interactions.
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