Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Existing studies in cognitive neuroscience predominantly focus on a single participant’s behavioral and brain re-sponses. Lack of an interactive context for joint action particularly limited social neuroscience studies to simulated socialcontexts. Advances in portable brain imaging technologies have made it practical to simultaneously monitor the brain activityof two or more people in an interactive context to investigate neural correlates of social interaction. In this study, the rela-tionship between behavioral synchrony and inter-brain coherence is investigated during simultaneous reading of matching andmismatching sentences in different auditory conditions. A dual-fNIRS hyperscanning setup was used to obtain simultaneousrecordings of hemodynamic activity from the prefrontal cortices of the participants while they jointly read-aloud the sentencesdisplayed on their screens. The results suggest that the level of inter-brain coherence in the right superior cortex tends toincrease depending on the level of behavioral synchrony among the participants.