Research Hit: Your Brain On Cooperation

How brain waves respond to key cooperative events showing that we are wired for cooperation

You written before about inter-brain synchrony - how is this different?

Yes, indeed inter-brain synchrony is when participants brains synchronise during collective activities - but often also predicts how aligned and how successful mutual cooperation will be.

This piece of research just published by Karl‐Philipp Flösch of the University of Konstanz looked into participants brain waves while mutually playing pacman.

Playing pacman!

Yes, well-known games such as Pacman can be very useful in research because they are very well known and the rules are simple.

How did they collaboratively play then?

Well, that is the clever bit about the research two players were playing but only one could see the route that the Pacman could take and therefore had to communicate with the other player to take the correct, or optimal route, or route decisions. However, this could only be communicated using pre-defined symbols.

Ok, sounds tough, and what did this show?