Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The studys objective was to measure the somatic state response (skin conductance and heart rate) and understand thedecision making processes in a two-player Centipede game, an extensive form game, with a modified payoff. The experi-ment included fixed and random termination for analyzing the effect of players mutual trust on risk-taking behavior. Thebehavioral results reveal that trust controls the game rounds (that is, the number of pass decisions) in known or randomtermination game conditions, though the exit points were higher in the former compared to the latter condition. Higherskin conductance and heart rate during the game-play is noticed as compared to the baseline data showing anxiety duringthe gameplay and interestingly opponents action induced higher skin conductance amplitude than during self-play for thesame decision. The data provides strong preliminary evidence of trust influencing cooperative gameplay.