Multimodal collaborative brain-computer interfaces aid human-machine team decision-making in a pandemic scenario

Objective. Critical decisions are made by effective teams that are characterized by individuals who trust each other and know how to best integrate their opinions. Here, we introduce a multimodal brain-computer interface (BCI) to help collaborative teams of humans and an artificial agent achieve more accurate decisions in assessing danger zones during a pandemic scenario. Approach. Using high-resolution simultaneous electroencephalography/functional MRI (EEG/fMRI), we first disentangled the neural markers of decision-making confidence and trust and then employed machine-learning to decode these neural signatures for BCI-augmented team decision-making. We assessed the benefits of BCI on the team’s decision-making process compared to the performance of teams of different sizes using the standard majority or weighing individual decisions. Main results. We showed that BCI-assisted teams are significantly more accurate in their decisions than traditional teams, as the BCI is capable of capturing distinct neural correlates of confidence on a trial-by-trial basis. Accuracy and subjective confidence in the context of collaborative BCI engaged parallel, spatially distributed, and temporally distinct neural circuits, with the former being focused on incorporating perceptual information processing and the latter involving action planning and executive operations during decision making. Among these, the superior parietal lobule emerged as a pivotal region that flexibly modulated its activity and engaged premotor, prefrontal, visual, and subcortical areas for shared spatial-temporal control of confidence and trust during decision-making. Significance. Multimodal, collaborative BCIs that assist human-artificial agent teams may be utilized in critical settings for augmented and optimized decision-making strategies.