Inter-brain synchrony in teams predicts collective performance

Abstract

Despite decades of research in economics and psychology attempting to identify ingredients that make up successful teams, neuroscientists have only just begun to study how multiple brains interact. Recent research has shown that people’s brain activity becomes synchronized with others’ (inter-brain synchrony) during social engagement. However, little is known as to whether inter-brain synchrony relates to collective behavior within teams. Here, we merge the nascent field of group neuroscience with the extant literature of team dynamics and collective performance. We recruited 174 participants in groups of 4 and randomly assigned them to complete a series of problem-solving tasks either independently or as a team, while simultaneously recording each person’s brain activity using an EEG hyperscanning setup. This design allowed us to examine the relationship between group identification and inter-brain synchrony in explaining collective performance. As expected, teammates identified more strongly with one another, cooperated more on an economic game, and outperformed the average individual on most problem-solving tasks. Crucially, inter-brain synchrony, but not self-reported group identification, predicted collective performance among teams. These results suggest that inter-brain synchrony can be informative in understanding collective performance among teams where self-report measures may fail to capture behavior.

Team Flow Is a Unique Brain State Associated with Enhanced Information Integration and Interbrain Synchrony

“…Group activities can enhance this synchrony during intense social states, body or speech coordination, music production, dancing, student-teacher interactions in classrooms, touch-mediated pain reduction, creativity in cooperative tasks, and even in socially interacting bats ( Lindenberger et al, 2009 ; Dumas et al, 2010 ; Sanger et al, 2012 ; Yun et al, 2012 ; Kawasaki et al, 2013 ; Dikker et al, 2017 ; Goldstein et al, 2018 ; Poikonen et al, 2018 ; Lu et al, 2019 ; Zhang and Yartsev, 2019 ). Importantly, teams exhibit higher interbrain synchrony compared with solo performers ( Reinero et al, 2021 ). We posit that interbrain synchrony can be a metric for more effective group interactions.…”

An Active Inference Model of Collective Intelligence

“…Accounts of global-scale (collective) behavior, by contrast, tend to adopt system-based (rather than agent-based) perspectives that render collectives as random dynamical systems in phase space, or equivalent formulations [ 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ]. Only rarely deployed to assess the construct of human collective intelligence specifically (e.g., [ 27 ]), these approaches have been fruitful for identifying gross properties of phase-space dynamics (such as synchrony, metastability, or symmetry breaking) that correlate with collective intelligence or collective performance, more generally construed [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ]. However, on their own, such analyses are limited in their ability to generate testable predictions for multiscale behavior, such as how global-scale dynamics (rendered in phase-space) translate to specific local-scale interactions between individuals (in state-space), or how local-scale interactions between individuals translate to evolution and change in collective global-scale dynamics [ 26 ].…”

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

“…We first asked whether the average envelope correlation reflected dyads' personal distress (Davis, 1980), building on past research where we consistently find a negative relationship between personal distress and inter-brain synchrony (Dikker et al, 2017(Dikker et al, , 2021Chen et al, 2021;Reinero et al, 2021). Indeed, we find that pairs' average personal distress was negatively correlated with their neurofeedback synchrony in theta [r ( 236 We then asked whether social closeness (Aron et al, 1992) was positively related to pairs' envelope correlations.…”