On Thursday 7 March, Jan Gläscher, from the Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the University of Hamburg, visits to give a presentation as part of the SWE Colloquium.

Successful cooperation by coordination of mental models

Humans are experts in cooperation. To effectively engage with others, they have to apply Theory of Mind (ToM), that is they have to model others beliefs, desires, and intentions and predict their behavior from these mental states. In this talk I present data from a EEG hyperscanning study in which we investigated ToM processes during novel, real-time cooperative decision game. The game consists of a noisy and unstable environment. For successful cooperation participants have to model the state of the world and their partner’s belief about it and integrate both pieces of information into a coherent decision. We modeled the behavior with Interactive Partially Observable Markov Decisions Processes (I-POMDP) a computational framework that extends single agent action planning under uncertainty to the multi-agent domain by including intentional models of other agents. Using this framework, we successfully predicted interactive behavior. Critically, modeling the other partner’s belief accurately led to more coordinated actions and hence to more success in the game. Using model-based EEG and the extracted the beliefs from the I-POMDP model we investigated “belief prediction errors” in the brain and found neural signatures for own and other belief prediction errors in the lower frequency bands primarily across frontal and central sensors. In summary, our data provide evidence that participants used their ToM capacity to model the beliefs of the other partner and integrate their belief into their action planning. Updating this complex belief structure depends on a specific prediction error computed for both players. All of this suggests that successful cooperation relies on the coordination of mental models.