Hybrid Harmony: A Multi-Person Neurofeedback Application for Interpersonal Synchrony

Abstract

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in studies measuring brain activity, physiological responses, and/or movement data from multiple individuals during social interaction. For example, so-called “hyperscanning” research has demonstrated that brain activity may become synchronized across people as a function of a range of factors. Such findings not only underscore the potential of hyperscanning techniques to capture meaningful aspects of naturalistic interactions, but also raise the possibility that hyperscanning can be leveraged as a tool to help improve such naturalistic interactions. Building on our previous work showing that exposing dyads to real-time inter-brain synchrony neurofeedback may help boost their interpersonal connectedness, we describe the biofeedback application Hybrid Harmony, a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) that supports the simultaneous recording of multiple neurophysiological datastreams and the real-time visualization and sonification of inter-subject synchrony. We report results from 236 dyads experiencing synchrony neurofeedback during naturalistic face-to-face interactions, and show that pairs' social closeness and affective personality traits can be reliably captured with the inter-brain synchrony neurofeedback protocol, which incorporates several different online inter-subject connectivity analyses that can be applied interchangeably. Hybrid Harmony can be used by researchers who wish to study the effects of synchrony biofeedback, and by biofeedback artists and serious game developers who wish to incorporate multiplayer situations into their practice.

Trait mindful awareness predicts inter-brain coupling but not individual brain responses during naturalistic face-to-face interactions

“…The interaction typically lasted 10 min. Real-time inter-brain power correlations were calculated and used to generate visual feedback for the participants as part of the 10-min experience (Chen et al, 2021). Specifically, EEG data collected from the pair was processed in 6-s windows in real time.…”

“…In the offline analyses, our group has previously found that inter-brain coupling is linked to social closeness, personal distress, and shared social attention (Dikker et al, 2017(Dikker et al, , 2021, demonstrating scientific validity of the paradigm. Here, we use the same paradigm (Chen et al, 2021) to investigate trait mindful awareness, with the following differences: we used a four-channel instead of a 14-channel portable EEG headset, adopted a different synchrony metric (Circular Correlation Coefficient, see Data Analysis), and asked different research questions.…”

Resonance as a Design Strategy for AI and Social Robots

“…The ability to identify and measure interpersonal synchrony has facilitated a great deal of social research (Condon and Ogston, 1966 ; Kendon, 1970 ; Bernieri et al, 1988 ). Recent efforts have compared different ways of measuring both movement and inter-brain synchrony, using both offline and real-time approaches (Ayrolles et al, 2021 ; Chen et al, 2021 ; Dikker et al, 2021 ; Fujiwara and Yokomitsu, 2021 ). However, the measurement of resonance presents distinct challenges.…”

Inter-brain plasticity as a biological mechanism of change in psychotherapy: A review and integrative model

“…Gvirts and Perlmutter (2020) propose a mechanism for this effect, suggesting that inter-brain synchrony may help increase mutual attention and social alignment-the tendency of individuals to align their motions, emotions and cognitions (Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2019). Recent studies have examined these questions using dyadic neurofeedback paradigms, in which participants' brain activity is visualized (e.g., by displaying coherence metrics between two people's EEG readings; Chen et al, 2021), allowing them to see whether it is synchronized or not. Participants who are instructed to use this feedback to increase their inter-brain synchrony over time are able to do so (e.g., Susnoschi Luca et al, 2021).…”