Brain Mapping of Behavior Contagion Based on Visibility Graph Analysis of ERP Signals

• Published in: Basic and clinical neuroscience Vol. 16; no. 4; pp. 833 - 844
• Main Authors: Sorayani, Mohammad Hossein, Vahabie, Abdol-Hossein, Hatami, Javad, Khosrowabadi, Reza
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tehran Negah Scientific Publisher 01.07.2025
• Subjects: Behavior; Brain mapping; Brain research; Computer engineering; Decision making; EEG; Event-related potentials; Experiments; Game theory; Modularity; Neurosciences; Social behavior; Social interactions; Time series
• ISSN: 2008-126X; 2228-7442
• DOI: 10.32598/bcn.2025.7653.1

Behavior contagion in social decision-making refers to the alignment of an individual's behavior and decisions with those of others in social interactions. Despite the previous studies in the field, it is still required to be well understood that how the brain activities are spatio-temporally organized while contagion is occurred. Since brain activities include both positive and negative fluctuations, monitoring of these occurrences in a polar space using visibility graph can aid in a better understanding of this phenomenon. Therefore, we exposed a healthy group to a psycho-economic task while their EEG was simultaneously recorded. The participants performances were compared before and after observation of others’ preferences in a dictator game task. Subsequently, two groups were differentiated based on their behavior contagion rate. Then, visibility graph of event related potentials in both contagion and non-contagion groups were compared before and after observation. Our results indicated that the visibility graph features differentially change in various EEG channels. For instance, changes in clustering coefficient, modularity, and efficiency of VGs indicated that number of ERP components varies after contagion specifically at the frontal, frontocentral, centroparietal and parietal regions. This may put a question mark on ERP analysis of contagion while using the same number and length of components (eg. P300) for comparison of ERPs before and after contagion.