Rumiati, R. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2021

Investigating the Impact of Offer Frame Manipulations On Responders Playing The Ultimatum Game

The present study was designed to test the impact of frame manipulations on the decision-making of responders playing the ultimatum game. Experiment 1 investigated responders event-related potentials (ERPs) measured in response to the offers as a function of the frame (i.e., negative: "the proposer keeps" versus positive "the proposer offers"). While no difference in acceptation rate was found as a function of the offers frame, electrophysiological results suggest that the stronger negative affective response to the offers in the negative frame (N400) was successfully reappraised by the responders (P600), possibly explaining why the offer frame manipulation did not modulate acceptation rates. No framing effect was found when the ultimatum game was played in its one-shot version (Experiment 2), suggesting that repeated measurements did not affect responders behavior. However, an offer framing effect was found in female (but not in male) responders, when the players cognitive charge was increased using more complex game rules (Experiment 3), presumably reflecting womens greater affective responses to negative outcomes. Taken together, these results suggest that framing manipulations are associated with complex affective and cognitive processes, supporting the cognitive-affective tradeoff model.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

No fruits without color: Cross-modal priming and EEG reveal different roles for different features across semantic categories

Category-specific impairments witnessed in patients with semantic deficits have broadly dissociated into natural and artificial kinds. However, how the category of food (more specifically, fruits and vegetables) fits into this distinction has been difficult to interpret, given a pattern of deficit that has inconsistently mapped onto either kind, despite its intuitive membership to the natural domain. The present study explores the effects of a manipulation of a visual sensory (i.e., color) or functional (i.e., orientation) feature on the consequential semantic processing of fruits and vegetables (and tools, by comparison), first at the behavioral and then at the neural level. The categorization of natural (i.e., fruits/vegetables) and artificial (i.e., utensils) entities was investigated via cross-modal priming. Reaction time analysis indicated a reduction in priming for color-modified natural entities and orientation-modified artificial entities. Standard event-related potentials (ERP) analysis was performed, in addition to linear classification. For natural entities, a N400 effect at central channel sites was observed for the color-modified condition compared relative to normal and orientation conditions, with this difference confirmed by classification analysis. Conversely, there was no significant difference between conditions for the artificial category in either analysis. These findings provide strong evidence that color is an integral property to the categorization of fruits/vegetables, thus substantiating the claim that feature-based processing guides as a function of semantic category.

neuroscience↗