Dr. Christine Michel, Ezgi Kayhan & Miriam Langeloh | Face-to-face and brain-to-brain: Hyperscanning in live social interactions

Infants depend on their caregivers to coordinate attention with them and learn new things. In order to deepen our understanding of social learning and communication in development, we adopt a two-person account of developmental social neuroscience. The multimodal and dynamic qualities of live social interactions are taken into account in our current research paradigms. Furthermore, brain-to-brain coupling, suggested to facilitate communication and temporal contingency in social interactions in adults, is an intriguing phenomenon that has not been addressed in previous developmental neuroscience research.

Here, we present three hyperscanning studies building up on our earlier work with infants:

(1) As our previous work has shown, oscillatory brain activity can discriminate between joint attention and non-joint attention situations in infants in live social interactions. Christine Michel presents a study in which we investigate the role of brain-to-brain synchrony in live joint attention situations in adults with the goal to adapt the hyperscanning paradigm to infant-caregiver dyads.

(2) Imitation is an important social learning mechanism. Our previous research demonstrated neural correlates of early action understanding underlying infants’ imitative behavior. Miriam Langeloh will present a hyperscanning project focusing on brain-to-brain coupling between two adults in a live imitation paradigm. This study will also establish a basis for future dual-EEG research with infant-adult-dyads.

(3) From a young age, children are able to use information from their environment to form predictions about events. Ezgi Kayhan will talk about two previous studies on how infants form predictions and present a current project in which we use combined dual EEG/fNIRS hyperscanning technique to investigate whether brain-to-brain coupling is enhanced when people are predicting other’s actions.

Poster