P300-CE as a Neural Indicator of Decision-Making Style and General Susceptibility to Behavioral Addiction

Abstract

A preregistered, large-sample individual-differences study (N = 200 healthy adults) testing whether P300-CE — a newly discovered, large and sustained event-related brain response to critical gaming events — is a stable neural marker of behavioural-addiction vulnerability and exploration–exploitation decision style, and whether working-memory capacity moderates these associations. Participants complete one laboratory session comprising 64-channel EEG with naturalistic Flappy-Bird game play, four reinforcement-learning tasks, three working-memory tasks, and three behavioural-addiction questionnaires. Hypotheses are tested with hierarchical Bayesian computational modelling and latent-variable structural equation modelling.