Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The establishment of symbolic communication system, i.e., making a shared meaning system from meaninglesssignals, is studied in experimental semiotics (Galantucci, 2005). Local neural activities within a brain region during a symboliccommunication task (Konno et al., 2013), where two participants try to establish a symbolic communication system fromscratch, has been studied (Li et al, 2015). It is, however, not certain how information bindings between different brain regionsis involved in a cognitive process associated with the establishment process. We analyzed EEG phase synchronization, as ameasure of functional connectivity, of participants engaged in the symbolic communication task. We found the recruitmentof fronto-occipital synchronization at 40 Hz frequency (gamma band), when a symbolic message was displayed, became fastwhen establishing a symbolic communication system. This finding suggests that frontal-occipital information binding by phasesynchronization becomes efficiently used in the course of mutual understanding of symbolic messages.