Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The importance of human-agent negotiation, and the role ofemotion in such negotiations, have been emphasized in human-agent interaction research. Thus far, studies have focused onbehavioral effects, rather than examining the neural underpin-nings of different behaviors shown in human-agent interac-tions. Here, we used a multi-round negotiation platform, in-stead of the more common single-shot negotiation, and wereable to find distinct brain patterns in emotion-related regionsof the brain during different types of offers. Using multi-voxelpattern analysis to analyze brain imaging data acquired duringfunctional MRI scanning, we show that it is possible to pre-dict whether the negotiator concedes, does not change, or asksfor more during the negotiation. Most importantly, we demon-strate that left dorsal anterior insula, which is known to be anemotion-related brain region, shows a different pattern of ac-tivity for each of the three offer types.