Interbrain phase synchronization during turn‐taking verbal interaction—a hyperscanning study using simultaneous EEG/MEG

Abstract

Recently, neurophysiological findings about social interaction have been investigated widely, and hardware has been developed that can measure multiple subjects' brain activities simultaneously. These hyperscanning studies have enabled us to discover new and important evidences of interbrain interactions. Yet, very little is known about verbal interaction without any visual input. Therefore, we conducted a new hyperscanning study based on verbal, interbrain turn-taking interaction using simultaneous EEG/MEG, which measures rapidly changing brain activities. To establish turn-taking verbal interactions between a pair of subjects, we set up two EEG/MEG systems (19 and 146 channels of EEG and MEG, respectively) located 100 miles apart. Subjects engaged in verbal communication via condenser microphones and magnetic-compatible earphones, and a network time protocol synchronized the two systems. Ten subjects participated in this experiment and performed verbal interaction and noninteraction tasks separately. We found significant oscillations in EEG alpha and MEG alpha/ gamma bands in several brain regions for all subjects. Furthermore, we estimated phase synchronization between two brains using the weighted phase lag index and found statistically significant

MNE: Software for Acquiring, Processing, and Visualizing MEG/EEG Data

“…Brain-computer interfaces and hyperscanning. Two emerging approaches in rehabilitation science, social neuroscience, and computational psychiatry are BCIs (Höhne et al, 2014;Mohanty et al, 2018) and hyperscanning (Bilek et al, 2017;Ahn et al, 2018;Goldstein et al, 2018;Zhdanov et al, 2015). It is likely that soon new acquisition paradigms will emerge both for basic research and clinical practice in which BCI and hyperscanning will be combined, such that the stimulation will be driven by brain activity of several individuals (Rao et al, 2014;Jiang et al, 2018).…”

MNE: Software for Acquiring, Processing,and Visualizing MEG/EEG Data

“…Brain-computer interfaces and hyperscanning. Two emerging approaches in rehabilitation science, social neuroscience, and computational psychiatry are BCIs (Höhne et al, 2014;Mohanty et al, 2018) and hyperscanning (Bilek et al, 2017;Ahn et al, 2018;Goldstein et al, 2018;Zhdanov et al, 2015). It is likely that soon new acquisition paradigms will emerge both for basic research and clinical practice in which BCI and hyperscanning will be combined, such that the stimulation will be driven by brain activity of several individuals (Rao et al, 2014;Jiang et al, 2018).…”

Getting into sync: Data‐driven analyses reveal patterns of neural coupling that distinguish among different social exchanges

“…With these techniques, studies have revealed various patterns of neural coupling elicited during social interaction; while temporally contingent brain responses are observed between interactants during verbal and non-verbal communication (Ahn et al, 2017;Bilek et al, 2015;Pérez, Carreiras, & Duñabeitia, 2017), between-brain synchrony or "alignment" (Hasson & Frith, 2016) is reported during cooperative and competitive joint-action tasks (e.g., Cheng, Li, & Hu, 2015;Sänger, Müller, & Lindenberger, 2012;Shaw et al, 2018;Toppi et al, 2016).…”