Mirroring and beyond: coupled dynamics as a generalized framework for modelling social interactions

By Uri Hasson, ChrisD . Frith. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016

342 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When people observe one another, behavioural alignment can be detected at many levels, from the physical to the mental. Likewise, when people process the same highly complex stimulus sequences, such as films and stories, alignment is detected in the elicited brain activity. In early sensory areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to the low-level properties of the stimulus (shape, motion, volume, etc.), while in high-order brain areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to high-levels aspects of the stimulus, such as meaning. Successful social interactions require such alignments (both behavioural and neural), as communication cannot occur without shared understanding. However, we need to go beyond simple, symmetric (mirror) alignment once we start interacting. Interactions are dynamic processes, which involve continuous mutual adaptation, development of complementary behaviour and division of labour such as leader–follower roles. Here, we argue that interacting individuals are dynamically coupled rather than simply aligned. This broader framework for understanding interactions can encompass both processes by which behaviour and brain activity mirror each other (neural alignment), and situations in which behaviour and brain activity in one participant are coupled (but not mirrored) to the dynamics in the other participant. To apply these more sophisticated accounts of social interactions to the study of the underlying neural processes we need to develop new experimental paradigms and novel methods of data analysis

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af1e3356714bc053e4613390cd573a79a93f4cf6

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Citations in the corpus

The Neurobiology of Human Attachments. (2017, neutral): “This form of interpersonal ‘matching’ relies on neural pathways that involve both the experience of internal body formats and the perception of similar states in others via perceptual–motor coupling [120,159].”
Network neuroscience (2017, background): “Could changes in the interactions among individuals lead to changes in the inter-subject correlation in brain activity 96 ?”
Investigating social alignment via mirroring in a system of interacting language models (2024, unknown): “One of the most direct mechanisms to achieve social alignment is social mirroring (Hasson and Frith, 2016).”