Inter-Brain Synchronization during Social Interaction

By Guillaume Dumas, Jacqueline Nadel, R. Soussignan, Jacques Martinerie, Line Garnero. PLoS ONE, 2010

858 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During social interaction, both participants are continuously active, each modifying their own actions in response to the continuously changing actions of the partner. This continuous mutual adaptation results in interactional synchrony to which both members contribute. Freely exchanging the role of imitator and model is a well-framed example of interactional synchrony resulting from a mutual behavioral negotiation. How the participants' brain activity underlies this process is currently a question that hyperscanning recordings allow us to explore. In particular, it remains largely unknown to what extent oscillatory synchronization could emerge between two brains during social interaction. To explore this issue, 18 participants paired as 9 dyads were recorded with dual-video and dual-EEG setups while they were engaged in spontaneous imitation of hand movements. We measured interactional synchrony and the turn-taking between model and imitator. We discovered by the use of nonlinear techniques that states of interactional synchrony correlate with the emergence of an interbrain synchronizing network in the alpha-mu band between the right centroparietal regions. These regions have been suggested to play a pivotal role in social interaction. Here, they acted symmetrically as key functional hubs in the interindividual brainweb. Additionally, neural synchronization became asymmetrical in the higher frequency bands possibly reflecting a top-down modulation of the roles of model and imitator in the ongoing interaction.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9943520d1348145e1a80f8b95c24e33f497aef94

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Learning to Synchronously Imitate Gestures Using Entrainment Effect (2016, background): “using hyper-scanning has revealed the emergence of millisecond inter-brain synchronization across multiple frequencies bands during social interactions (spontaneous exchanges between two participants of intransitive bi-manual movements [5]).”
The interactive brain hypothesis (2012, background): “…as a detached interpreter of social stimuli (see e.g., Van Overwalle, 2009) and to pay attention to neural mechanisms involved in embodied social interaction (Schilbach et al., 2006; Tognoli et al., 2007; Lindenberger et al., 2009; Dumas et al., 2010; Redcay et al., 2010; Pfeiffer et al., 2011).”
NIRS-Based Hyperscanning Reveals Increased Interpersonal Coherence in Superior Frontal Cortex during Cooperation (2011, positive): “EEG-based hyperscanning has enabled the study of social interaction in a more naturalistic environment (Astolfi et al., 2010; Dumas et al., 2010; Lindenberger et al., 2009), for example in poker playing (Babiloni et al.”
Towards the utilization of EEG as a brain imaging tool (2012, background): “Recently, such connectivity measures have also been used to study functional interactions between the brains of different subjects called “hyperscanning” (Astolfi et al., 2010; Dumas et al., 2010; Lindenberger et al., 2009).”