Abstract
Researchers from multiple fields have sought to understand how sex moderates human social behavior. While over 50 years of research has revealed differences in cooperation behavior of males and females, the underlying neural correlates of these sex differences have not been explained. A missing and fundamental element of this puzzle is an understanding of how the sex composition of an interacting dyad influences the brain and behavior during cooperation. Using fNIRS-based hyperscanning in 111 same- and mixed-sex dyads, we identified significant behavioral and neural sex-related differences in association with a computer-based cooperation task. Dyads containing at least one male demonstrated significantly higher behavioral performance than female/female dyads. Individual males and females showed significant activation in the right frontopolar and right inferior prefrontal cortices, although this activation was greater in females compared to males. Female/female dyad’s exhibited significant inter-brain coherence within the right temporal cortex, while significant coherence in male/male dyads occurred in the right inferior prefrontal cortex. Significant coherence was not observed in mixed-sex dyads. Finally, for same-sex dyads only, task-related inter-brain coherence was positively correlated with cooperation task performance. Our results highlight multiple important and previously undetected influences of sex on concurrent neural and behavioral signatures of cooperation.
Highlights
Research into the neuroscience of social behavior has highlighted a frontal-temporal network in the brain that underlies social cognition[1,2,3,4]
Behavioral cooperation task performance between male/male, male/female, and female/female dyads was assessed by a three-way analysis of variance
In terms of task-related cortical activation, our data indicate that the cooperation task elicited significant prefrontal activity, follow-up analyses indicated that this effect was driven by activation in female participants
Summary
Research into the neuroscience of social behavior has highlighted a frontal-temporal network in the brain that underlies social cognition[1,2,3,4]. These findings suggest that “different neural processes underlie cooperation between mixed-sex and same-sex dyadic interactions” These findings raise important empirical questions regarding the influence of sex on neural and behavioral signatures of cooperation and highlight the utility of fNIRS hyperscanning in addressing sex differences in social interactions. The identification of disparate patterns of inter-brain coherence throughout the frontal-temporal social network between same- and mixed-sex dyads may provide important information regarding the underlying source of sex-related differences in cooperation. We test the hypothesis that the sexual make-up of a cooperating dyad moderates signatures of cortical activation and inter-brain coherence within multiple fontal-temporal brain regions associated with social cognition To address this hypothesis, we employed fNIRS hyperscanning to concurrently image regions of the right prefrontal and right temporal cortices as same- and mixed-sex dyads engaged in a computer-based cooperation task
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