Tracing Brain Functional Connectivity During Observation of Others' Preferences could point to Occurrence of Behavioral Contagion

Behavioral contagion (BC) is defined as the mimic and adopt of others’ preferences after observing. This type of contagion has crucial role in changing behaviors of the individuals and groups. Our fMRI task-based study had been organized to understand about this phenomenon. Our task was developed on the basis of dictator game (DG) which is a behavioral economic paradigm. The task had three sessions, before, observation and after. During the three sessions, the participants were scanned for fMRI. In behavioral analysis we found some participants had shown BC after observing others’ preferences but some hadn’t. In this part of the study, we have tried to find the reasons for this difference between the Contagion and No-Contagion groups. To this end, the adjacency matrices of the two groups were compared in the resting state, session 1 and session 2. There was no significant difference between the adjacency matrices of the groups in the resting state. No significant difference was found when comparing sessions 1 either. However, in session 2, two completely different patterns were observed for the Contagion and No-Contagion groups. It is interesting to note that the pattern of No-Contagion group showed fourteen reduced connectivity, with most of the resources located in different layers of the frontal gyrus. The pattern of the Contagion group showed eight increased connectivity with different resources. We believe that these results provide a good insight into behavioral contagion and could prepare a predictor for the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of behavioral contagion in individuals.