Towards Neuroinformatic Approach for Second-Person Neuroscience

Abstract

In this work experimental and neuroinformatic approaches to solve current problems in second-person neuroscience area are presented. This direction was called as second (multi)-person neuroscience in opposite one-person neuroscience. During very long time, inter-person interaction was a subject of conceptual and heuristic consideration in frameworks of psychological and social science. At present, there are many studies in inter-person communication area by experimental neuroscience methods. Up to now research in this area has mainly focused on the accumulation of single phenomena and development of methodology. Main attention in our study is paid to dynamics of gaze fixations and emotions of test participants jointly viewed videos because these types of human activity are always the first behavioral responses during tasks solution. Given the wide variety of known methods used and the results obtained in the field of second-person neuroscience, the following items may be determined as priorities for our research: (i) the development of methods for rigorous quantitative evaluation of the results obtained for example to estimate the synchronicity for brain activity and eye movements; (ii) direct comparison of viewing emotional videos in the conditions of one-person and two-person experiments; (iii) the search for criteria for the selective assessment of the contribution of the mechanisms of the lower and upper levels of visual attention to the observed phenomena. At present, we are starting the investigations of these objectives. Initial testing of the developed experimental approach indicates the possibility of successfully solving the tasks under studying.