Social Incentives Shape Neural Circuits Underlying Cognitive Control

Social incentives powerfully shape human behavior. They may be imposed in the form of a social incentive (e.g., stimulating one’s action towards a common goal or to the benefit of others) or a social threat (e.g., exposing behavior). In contrast to monetary incentives, little is known about how social incentives affect human executive function. To address this knowledge gap, we studied 30 adults who performed the directional Eriksen flanker task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) under two social incentive conditions: i) Donation to charity, where they were told their performance contributes to a donation to a specific charitable goal; or ii) Ranking, where their performance would be compared to a public ranking relative to other participants. Behavioral results showed an overall speedup under both social incentives with only negligible increase in error rate. Four neuroimaging analytic approaches were taken to investigate neural responses to social incentives: i) regions-of-interest (ROI) analysis focused on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC), both implicated in executive control; ii) analysis of brain systems of interest, defined by Neurosynth reverse inference maps; iii) analysis of a priori resting-state networks; iv) whole-brain data-driven analysis with appropriate brain-wide type I error protection via permutation testing. Irrespective of the analysis choice, the results revealed an increase in overall ‘sustained’ neural activation during social incentive conditions. Critically, there was a concomitant modulation of transient neural responses in regions relevant to cognitive control during social incentives. Overall, the results reveal a significant impact of social incentives on motor and attentional control, as well as conflict resolution and inhibition, associated with robust executive control neural signal changes.