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When I budge but you don’t: Inter player theta power coupling forecasts future joint action outcome
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Poster E111 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Roksana Markiewicz1, Katrien Segaert1, Ali Mazaheri1; 1University of Birmingham
Communication between people can be considered a joint action and a key aspect of successful cooperation is effective use of feedback. Here, we examine joint adjustment in response to feedback in a two-player game while recording electroencephalography (EEG). Sixty young adults (i.e. 30 pairs) participated in a cooperation task in which they had to synchronise a button press with one another. Each trial was deemed successful if the pair pressed buttons within 250ms of each other. There was an auditory cue (a high, medium or low pitch tone) at the beginning of each trial to indicate the length of time (either ‘short’, ‘medium’, or ‘long’) participants had to wait before pressing the button. Without communication, they had to synchronise with their partner. They could use the feedback at the end of each trial to adjust their responses: they received a ‘Well done’ feedback after successful trials, and detailed negative feedback indicating who pressed the button first and the elapsed time between the button presses after unsuccessful trials. EEG was recorded from both participants simultaneously using 32 channel Waveguard caps. We used non-parametric cluster based permutation tests to examine condition differences in the inter player power coupling. We focused our analysis on the incorrect trials, which were further divided into two conditions: forecasting successful and failed cooperation. In line with previous reports, we found a significant increase in frontal midline theta activity after negative feedback. A positive correlation in theta power between players was associated with a significantly greater likelihood of an error in the next trial. On the other hand, a negative correlation in theta power between players was associated with successful subsequent trial. The current view of feedback induced theta activity is that it reflects network changes underlying behavioural adjustment. Our results suggest that the synchronization of these networks between cooperative players can have a maladaptive joint action outcomes.
Topic Areas: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes, Methods