The Neural Basis Of Decision-Making, Response And Outcome Evaluation Of Deception In An Interative Game:Fnirs And Erp Studies

Deception is an important adapted behavior. In the last decades, many researchers have attempted to investigate the neural mechanism of deception. Though much advancement, the cognitive and neural underpinnings of deception in real life are still poorly understood. Thus in the present study we employed highly ecologic paradigm-a modified window task to investigate the neural mechanism of decision-making, response and outcome evaluation of deception. Two studies were conducted. The first study recorded cortical activation using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during the modified window task, which can elicit the participants’spontaneous deception and truth-telling. We also use delayed-response method in the modified window task, so that we can distinguish the decision-making and response of deception and examine the neural basis of them separately. The second study is an ERP study. Using the same paradigm, we explored the brain activity of outcome evaluation of deception by giving the feedback stimulus after they made deceptive or truthful responses. The current research has achieved such conclusions:(1) Compared to control condition, greater activity was found in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when the participants made a decision to tell the truth in the modified window task; however, relative to true claims, false claims were associated with greater activity in the premotor and supplementary motor cortices.(2) For the neural basis of response of deception, compared to control condition, true claims were associated with greater activity in the premotor and supplementary motor cortices; there were no significant difference in response between true claims and false claims.(3) For neural basis of outcome evaluation, compared with gains, loss elicited a more negative FRN; a more negative FRN was also elicited by the outcome evaluation of deception than truth-telling.(4) For neural basis of outcome evaluation, compared with loss, gain elicited larger P300amplitude; deception can modulate the P300effect during outcome evaluation:the gain after truth-telling was elicited larger P300amplitude than deception during outcome evaluation. However, there was no significant difference in P300amplitude between the gain and loss after deception. There are three innovative parts of the research:first, the present research employed a highly ecological paradigm to investigate the neural basis of deception; second, it is the first study to use fNIRS to investigate the neural mechanism of deception. Here, we took advantage of features of fNIRS that can record brain activity in natural settings; third, most previous studies on deception mainly focused on the decision-making and response of deception. No researches have been conducted to examine the neural basis of outcome evaluation of deception. Therefore, this is also the first study to investigate the neural mechanism of outcome evaluation of deception.