Nirs-based hyperscanning reveals inter-brain neural synchronization during cooperative jenga game with face-to-face communication

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fnirs) is an increasingly popular technology for studying social cognition. in particular,fnirs permits simultaneous measurement of hemodynamic activity in two or more individuals interacting in a naturalistic setting. here,we used fnirs hyperscanning to study social cognition and communication in human dyads engaged in cooperative and obstructive interaction while they played the game of jenga™. novel methods were developed to identify synchronized channels for each dyad and a structural node-based spatial registration approach was utilized for interdyad analyses. strong inter-brain neural synchrony (ins) was observed in the posterior region of the right middle and superior frontal gyrus,in particular brodmann area 8 (ba8),during cooperative and obstructive interaction. this synchrony was not observed during the parallel game play condition and the dialog section,suggesting that ba8 was involved in goal-oriented social interaction such as complex interactive movements and social decision-making. ins was also observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmpfc),in particular brodmann 9,during cooperative interaction only. these additional findings suggest that ba9 may be particularly engaged when theory-of-mind (tom) is required for cooperative social interaction. the new methods described here have the potential to significantly extend fnirs applications to social cognitive research. © 2016 liu,mok,witt,pradhan,chen and reiss.