Departmental Colloquium: Giorgio Coricelli: Cognitive hierarchy theory of Strategic thinking: behavioral and neural evidence

“Cognitive hierarchy theory of Strategic thinking: behavioral and neural evidence”

by Giorgio Coricelli

We used functional MRI (fMRI) and eye-tracking to investigate human mental processes in interactive decision making. Our main goal is to investigate whether and how a player’s mental processing incorporates the thinking process of others in strategic reasoning. We apply a cognitive hierarchy model to classify subject’s choices in experimental games according to the degree of strategic reasoning so that we can identify the neural substrates of different levels of strategizing. According to this model, high-level reasoners expect the others to behave strategically, whereas low-level reasoners choose based on the expectation that others will choose randomly. The data show that high-level reasoning and a measure of strategic IQ (related to winning in the game) correlate with the neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, demonstrating its crucial role in successful mentalizing. With the eye-tracking data we were able to evaluate different theories of limited cognition. Our results are coherent with the existence of individually heterogeneous patterns of initial responses, which are based on a set of a priori types. These findings support a cognitive hierarchy model of human brain and behavior.