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Goal or Gold: Overlapping Reward Processes in Soccer Players upon Scoring and Winning Money

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  • Alexander Niklas Häusler
  • Benjamin Becker
  • Marcel Bartling
  • Bernd Weber

Abstract

Social rewards are important incentives for human behavior. This is especially true in team sports such as the most popular one worldwide: soccer. We investigated reward processing upon scoring a soccer goal in a standard two-versus-one situation and in comparison to winning in a monetary incentive task. The results show a strong overlap in brain activity between the two conditions in established reward regions of the mesolimbic dopaminergic system, including the ventral striatum and ventromedial pre-frontal cortex. The three main components of reward-associated learning i.e. reward probability (RP), reward reception (RR) and reward prediction errors (RPE) showed highly similar activation in both con-texts, with only the RR and RPE components displaying overlapping reward activity. Passing and shooting behavior did not correlate with individual egoism scores, but we observe a positive correlation be-tween egoism and activity in the left middle frontal gyrus upon scoring after a pass versus a direct shot. Our findings suggest that rewards in the context of soccer and monetary incentives are based on similar neural processes.

Suggested Citation

  • Alexander Niklas Häusler & Benjamin Becker & Marcel Bartling & Bernd Weber, 2015. "Goal or Gold: Overlapping Reward Processes in Soccer Players upon Scoring and Winning Money," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(4), pages 1-16, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0122798
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122798
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