Our social life consists mostly of coordination problems, where we must converge on choices and strategies that will benefit all parties involved. When a solution becomes widely and repeatedly adopted, it becomes a "social convention" in a certain group or population. This project carries out the first investigation of the neural basis of the emergence and consolidation of conventions. In particular, it studies whether (and if so, how) conventions have the tendency to evolve into norms that individuals prefer not to breach. One hypothesis is that as conventions become repeated the "social pain" associated with breaching them increases to the point where it can outweigh possible benefits to the individual associated with breaking these social rules. This idea can be tested by measuring brain activity using the technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging while volunteers play a simple coordination game. The hypothesis predicts activities in brain regions which have previously been shown to respond to rewards and social disgust, dependent upon the extent to which conventions have become established over multiple rounds of the game.

fMRI scanning. Data is in the form of functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI scan time series, comprising 215 digital data files per participant pair in Nifti data format, representing a series of 3D volumetric images of the brain. In isolation these images do not provide any information regarding brain activity under different conditions, but must be processed using Statistical Parametric Mapping software run in the Matlab software environment. For each participant a statistical model is constructed from the behavioural sequence, recorded separately in an excel spreadsheet file which indicates the exact timing and type of behavioural response executed by each participant at each stage of the task. This model is then tested for every 3D "voxel" in the brain for every participant. In total the fMRI data collected over the course of the project totals over 30Gbytes.