Striatum-centered fiber connectivity is associated with the personality trait of cooperativeness

Abstract

Cooperativeness is an essential behavioral trait evolved to facilitate group living. Social and cognitive mechanisms involved in cooperation (e.g., motivation, reward encoding, action evaluation, and executive functions) are sub-served by the striatal-projected circuits, whose physical existence has been confirmed by animal studies, human postmortem studies, and in vivo human brain studies. The current study investigated the associations between Cooperativeness and fiber connectivities from the striatum to nine subcortical and cortical regions, including the amygdala, hippocampus, medial orbitofrontal cortex, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex/retrosplenial cortex, dorsal cingulate cortex, and rostral cingulate cortex. Results showed that Cooperativeness was negatively correlated with fiber connectivity for the cognitive control system (from the dorsal caudate to the rostral cingulate cortex and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with fiber connectivity for the social cognitive system (e.g., connectivity with the medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala). These results partially supported Declerck et al.'s (2013) cognitive neural model of the role of cognitive control and social cognition in cooperation.