16.05.2025 The neurocomputational mechanisms of learning about others’ cooperative and competitive intentions under ambiguity

Adequately navigating social interactions requires learning about others’ intentions, i.e., whether they intend to cooperate or compete. However, in many contexts, individuals can only observe others’ outcomes, leaving the information about their intentions, goals, and capacities ambiguous and incomplete. One motivation to develop a task that captures intention learning under such ambiguous situations is that this learning becomes even more challenging for people with personality disorders, as they already have difficulties in inferring others’ internal mental states. Here, we tested healthy participants in a set of studies (3 behavioral experiments, N = 99 in total; one fMRI experiment, N = 32). We designed variants of sequential social decision-making tasks to investigate how individuals navigate ambiguous situations in which others’ internal intentions and the influence of the external environment are congruent or incongruent. That is, participants need to infer whether the observed outcomes are determined by the external environment or the inherent intentions of others. Our results revealed a negativity bias: participants learned competitive intentions better than cooperative intentions in incongruent conditions. Variants of Rescorla-Wagner models and Bayesian learning frameworks described the intention learning process. The bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction were involved in the interaction of ambiguity, intention and outcome. Taken together, our results underscore the challenges of deciphering different intentions in ambiguous environments and the critical role of a negativity bias. Our task is promising as a tool to test and understand social dysfunctions, for example in patients with personality disorders. 

Christoph Korn with Sihui Zhang

Christoph Korn specializes in social neuroscience and systems neuroscience. He is currently Assistant Professor of Social Neuroscience and Principal Investigator of an Emmy Noether research group in the Department of General Adult Psychiatry at Heidelberg University Hospital. Christoph earned his Dr. phil. in Psychology summa cum laude from Freie Universität Berlin in 2013. His postdoctoral work took place at Hamburg-Eppendorf (2016–2018) within the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre SFB TRR 169 Crossmodal Learning and at the Zurich University Hospital for Psychiatry (2013–2016).  He has also completed research stays at Harvard University and published in outlets such as Nature Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience, Current Biology and Psychological Medicine.