EEG hyperscanning study of inter-brain synchrony during cooperative and competitive interaction

Abstract

Social cognition is the study of how people interact with each other in a social situation. An effective interaction would require higher degree of cognitive involvement between the participants and consequently, an enhanced synchrony between their neural mechanisms. In this study, twelve pairs of subjects interacted with each other via a cognitively engaging experimental paradigm in which they either competed or cooperated with each other for performing a task. While they were performing the task we incorporated electroencephalographic (EEG) hyperscanning techniques by simultaneously recording the EEG activities of the interacting subjects. We quantified these interactions by computing the inter-brain synchrony (IBS) and studied the changes in IBS under different experimental conditions. We found that the inter-brain synchrony between the subjects was significantly higher when they cooperated with each other as compared to the competitive scenario. Furthermore, we found that IBS was significantly enhanced when the subjects were physically separated i.e. they cooperated via an intranet network. In this work, we have demonstrated how EEG hyperscanning technique can be employed to study inter-brain synchronization under different conditions.