Would you play harder against a human than a computer?

For 24 subjects recently studied  in a Prisoner’s dilemma game by Krach et al, the answer appears to have been yes. Half of the subjects were deceived into believing that they were playing humans instead of computers, and the brain activities of all subjects were studied using fMRI.

The study found higher activation in the anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortices in subjects who believed they were playing humans, which they inferred as indicating a greater use of theory of mind.

I don’t understand most of their voxel number analysis, but it seems clear that there is differentiated activity in the brain when subjejcts believed they are playing computers versus playing humans, which seems important as more and more of our lives become digital.

Reference

Krach S, Bluemel I, Marjoram D, Latsteter T, Krabbendam L, Weber J, van Os J, Kircher T. 2009 Are women better mindreaders? Sex differences in neural correlates of mentalizing detected with functional MRI. BCI neuroscience 10:9. doi:10.1186/1471-2202-10-9.