Presentation

Sara Mazzini¹, Judith Holler^1,2, Peter Hagoort^1,2, Linda Drijvers¹; ¹Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, ²Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour

Inter-brain neural synchrony has been observed during several cognitive tasks, such as joint attention, speech interactions and cooperative tasks, suggesting that neural alignment between individuals is an important feature of social interactions. Nonetheless, it is still unknown whether intra- and inter-brain synchrony are necessary and/or beneficial for successful face-to-face communication. Here, we use dual-EEG to study the relation between neural synchrony, within and between conversational partners, and episodes of successful and unsuccessful communication during multimodal interactions. Moreover, we investigate whether the presence of co-speech gestures affects the strength of inter-brain neural synchrony. Dyads will perform a tangram-based referential communication task, while both their EEG and audiovisual behavior is recorded. We will compare brain-to-speech entrainment and inter-brain synchrony during episodes of miscommunication and episodes of mutual understanding. Additionally, we investigate whether co-speech gestures modulate these neural patterns. We expect that when communication is successful, inter-brain synchrony and brain-to-speech entrainment will be stronger than when communication is unsuccessful, and we expect that these patterns will be most pronounced when co-speech gestures are present. Preliminary results will be discussed.

Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Perception: Speech Perception and Audiovisual Integration