2018 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
| Project/Area Number |
18F18008
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
四本 裕子 東京大学, 大学院総合文化研究科, 准教授 (80580927)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
LIN WEN-JING 東京大学, 総合文化研究科, 外国人特別研究員
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| Project Period (FY) |
2018-04-25 – 2020-03-31
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| Keywords | social information / fMRI / decoding |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
People make various decisions every day. From what to eat, where to visit for vacation, which job offer to take, and so on. Social information, no doubt, has a certain degree of influence on the decisions we make. The impact of social information also exists when people perform perceptual decision-making tasks, as Asch showed in his essential works in the 1950s. A question has been raised but remains unanswered: when people change their answers in perceptual decision-making tasks after receiving social information, does the perceptual representation in the brain change along with their behavioral responses? We combined functional MRI and multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to tackle this issue.
Results indicated that, participants changed their answers to agree with partner’s answers more frequently than when they changed their response to agree with random answers. This result indicates that participants did involve social information for visual perceptual decision making in this task. Furthermore, the classifier successfully classified the brain pattern of the first stimuli and that of the second stimuli when participants changed their answers to agree with partner’s answers. The result suggests that social information may be able to alter people's visual perception.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
We collected data from 44 subjects, and obtained fMRI data from 20 subjects. We finished analyzing the data, and are currently writing a manuscript.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
We will extend the first study and examine the effects of functional connectivity on social information and the resulting perceptual decision making. We are planning to conduct another fMRI study to look into the effect.
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