What part of the brain do we use when we engage in competitive social interactions such as poker? Dr. Ming Hsu of the University of California, Berkeley says that fMRI scans of participants playing a competitive game similar to poker displayed intense activity in the striatum and the medial prefrontal cortex. Hsu says there are two types of learning processes connected to these regions.

"One is what you can think of as more primitive type of trial and error learning. If it works I do it again, if it doesn't work I stop doing it, I move on to something else. The striatal regions is reflecting computation that seems to be consistent with those types of reinforcement learning models. In terms of these higher order learning, like if I’m playing poker, I don’t want to just do what works. I also want to anticipate what you’re going to do and respond to your actions. So this type of anticipation and learning, what we call belief learning is more reflected in activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is more hierarchically involved and more human if you will."