Live face-to-face interaction during fMRI: a new tool for social cognitive neuroscience

By Elizabeth Redcay, David Dodell-Feder, Mark J. Pearrow, Penelope L. Mavros, M. Kleiner, John D. E. Gabrieli, Rebecca Saxe. NeuroImage, 2010

328 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cooperative social interaction is critical for human social development and learning. Despite the importance of social interaction, previous neuroimaging studies lack two fundamental components of everyday face-to-face interactions: contingent responding and joint attention. In the current studies, functional MRI data were collected while participants interacted with a human experimenter face-to-face via live video feed as they engaged in simple cooperative games. In Experiment 1, participants engaged in a live interaction with the experimenter (“Live”) or watched a video of the same interaction (“Recorded”). During the “Live” interaction, as compared to the Recorded conditions, greater activation was seen in brain regions involved in social cognition and reward, including the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), right superior temporal sulcus (rSTS), ventral striatum, and amygdala. Experiment 2 isolated joint attention, a critical component of social interaction. Participants either followed the gaze of the live experimenter to a shared target of attention (“Joint Attention”) or found the target of attention alone while the experimenter was visible but not sharing attention (“Solo Attention”). The right temporo-parietal junction and right posterior STS were differentially recruited during Joint, as compared to Solo, attention. These findings suggest the rpSTS and rTPJ are key regions for both social interaction and joint attention. This method of allowing online, contingent social interactions in the scanner could open up new avenues of research in social cognitive neuroscience, both in typical and atypical populations.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9a04ee4b3695a087e13f460cad793bf82adff67

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Citations in the corpus

Behavioral and neural properties of social reinforcement learning (2011, background): “Human imaging studies have shown this region is sensitive when choosing to approach peers relative to celebrities (Güroğlu et al., 2008) and when engaging in a series of actions during live relative to recorded interactions (Redcay et al., 2010).”
Exploring Ad-Elicited Emotional Arousal and Memory for the Ad Using fMRI (2013, background): “Yet evidence given for a sociocognitive neural process using relatively passive exposure to stimuli is interesting, as fMRI studies on social cognitive neural networks have used more complex and interactive stimuli (e.g., Redcay et al. 2010).”
Inter-Brain Synchronization during Social Interaction (2010, unknown): “So-called interactive paradigms mainly consist in non contingent social stimuli that do not allow true social interaction [7].”
Mentalizing in the Development and Treatment of Attachment Trauma (2013, background): “A study obtaining functional brain images during a live interaction (via video) was notable in showing right TPJ activity during the actual interaction, as contrasted with activity during viewing a recording of the same interaction (Redclay et al., 2010).”
Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments: A Conceptual Framework (2019, background): “In the first fMRI study to compare brain responses to live interactions versus prerecorded ones, Redcay et al. (2010) found that live interaction sparked greater activity in brain regions associated with attention.”
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).”