Cooperative interactions profoundly shape individual and collective behaviors of social animals. Successful cooperation requires coordinated efforts by cooperators toward collective goals. However, the underlying behavioral dynamics and neuronal mechanisms within and between cooperating brains remain largely unknown. We recorded intracranial electrophysiological signals from human pairs engaged in a cooperation game. We show that teammate coordination and goal pursuit make distinct contributions to the behavioral cooperation dynamics. Increases and decreases in high-gamma activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and amygdala distinguish between establishing and maintaining cooperation and forecast transitions between these two states. High-gamma activity from distinct neuronal populations encodes teammate coordination and goal pursuit motives, with populations of TPJ neurons preferentially tracking dominant motives of different cooperation states. Across cooperating brains, high-gamma activity in the TPJ and amygdala synchronizes in a state-dependent manner that predicts how well cooperators coordinate. These findings provide fine-grained understandings of human cooperation dynamics as a state-dependent process with distinctive neurocognitive profiles of each state.

合作互动深刻地塑造了社会性动物的个体和集体行为。成功的合作需要合作者为实现集体目标而做出协调努力。然而，合作大脑内部和之间的潜在行为动力学和神经元机制在很大程度上仍然未知。我们记录了来自参与合作游戏的人类对的颅内电生理信号。我们表明，队友协调和目标追求对行为合作动态做出了明显的贡献。颞顶交界处 （TPJ） 和杏仁核中高 γ 活性的增加和减少区分了建立和维持合作以及预测这两种状态之间的过渡。来自不同神经元群的高 γ 活动编码队友协调和目标追求动机，TPJ 神经元群优先跟踪不同合作状态的主导动机。在合作的大脑中，TPJ 和杏仁核中的高 γ 活动以一种与状态相关的方式同步，从而预测合作者的协调程度。这些发现提供了对人类合作动态的精细理解，作为一个依赖于状态的过程，每种状态都有不同的神经认知特征。