Fig. 6. Higher functional coupling during trials classified as competitive compared to those classified as cooperative, between ‘reliability difference’ brain regions (mPFC and ventral striatum) from the controller and regions encoding more the prediction error in these classified trials.

For the connectivity analysis, the BOLD signal was extracted from seed regions (mPFC and ventral striatum using GLM1) computing the reliability difference between cooperative and competitive intentions of others (in Blue). The psychophysiological interaction effect shows higher functional coupling (voxels in red) with the left TPJ (x,y,z = −42,−40,50), left IPS (x,y,z = -48;−44;58) and right dlPFC (x,y,z = 38, 34, 34, p < 0.05 FWE threshold at p < 0.001) in trials classified as competitive as compared to those classified as cooperative.