Dual logic and dual neural basis for reciprocal social interaction in eye contact

Abstract

Dyadic brain interactions during eye contact engage multiple processes and recruit multiple networks. To fully characterize these concurrent activities, it's essential to establish the neural basis for reciprocal social interaction. So far most approaches in this pursuit suffered from the limitations in either insufficient dyadic test instruments or entwined reciprocal and non-reciprocal cerebral responses. To address these two challenges, this study not only employed a dual-head coil to directly acquire dyadic fMRI data, but also developed a dual logic to deductively untwine the reciprocal social interactive state and non-reciprocal affective state in cerebral responses. As results, a data-driven neural basis for visual reciprocal interaction is derived, which mainly consists of imitation-empathy network and mentalizing network to facilitate the exogenous and endogenous dual processes. Applications of the neural basis in extracting dyadic network synchronizations are exemplified. In addition, the dual logic formulated emergence of the endogenous process and predicted the default-mode network.