Using Minecraft to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms of human hunting behaviour

Recent research has focused on spatial coding of other moving agents or moving objects (Stangl et al., 2020). Oscillatory power in the medial temporal lobe of a seated observer is sensitive to the spatial location of a watched moving other individual (Stangl et al., 2020). The hippocampus also encodes predictions about when a moving target will hit a boundary on a 2D display (Polti et al., 2021). Using a 2D display and joystick, monkey dorsal anterior cingulate cortex activity predicts a moving target’s future location. (Yoo et al., 2021). However, it remains untested whether the encoding system for distance and direction to stationary goals in the human brain extends to moving goals. A classic situation where tracking moving goals occurs is in hunting behavior (Goodroe and Spiers, 2022). How encoding of distance and direction to moving targets and brain dynamics relate to hunting terrain remains unexplored. Recent unpublished work from the Spiers Lab has created a VR hunting task where participants chase a moving goal whose path is altered by a moving blocker agent, requiring participants to update internal representations of learned routes and future goal positions. Preliminary analysis suggests interesting roles for the dorsolateral prefrontal and frontopolar regions in coding future goals. Here, we extend this approach to multi-agent hunting, where the target hunted is a human-controlled avatar, using the video game Minecraft. In this task, two human players will work together to chase after another human-controlled character, the ‘prey’, whilst recording their brain activity using fNIRS.