Today I joined the talk “Hyperscanning – EEG recordings from multiple subjects” by Slobodan Tanackovic, g.tec medical engineering GmbH (HK) from the BCI & NEUROTECHNOLOGY SPRING SCHOOL 2020.
The idea behind hyperscanning is relies on measuring the activity of multiple brains simultanenously while social interacting or performing the same task. One of the main adavantages of this technique is that it allows the study of real-time dynamics of brain activity of single participants during social interaction as a unit, and allows for the investigation of intra- and inter-brain neural relations (Schilbach et al., 2013). The hyperscanning techniques thus offer a novel approach to account for the complexity of joint action, which constitutes a influential challenge for its neuroscientific examination.
If you want to know more about it, here’s a review written by a colleague on the hyperscanning research of the last two decades:
Front Hum Neurosci. 2020; 14: 39. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.00039
Hyperscanning: A Valid Method to Study Neural Inter-brain Underpinnings of Social Interaction
From my completely naïve experience with Hyperscanning, I can say that the authors of the review above are very wise when comparing the different methods that have been used by far in the literature to examine social interaction and determine connectivity between brains. As it happens in many other neurocognitive research fields, there exist a wide spectrum of methods, analysis, and experimental results and it’s good to joint them in a unique paper. And, as the authors suggest, to make a call for a more ecologically valid way of studying the social brain.
Sources
Feature image from Pexels – C0 license.
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