Analysis of synchronization component dynamics during a cooperative group task as assessed by electroencephalography

Social interaction and cooperation are fundamental and necessary aspects of human life. With recent research showing that brains synchronize while performing cooperative tasks, this paper aims to delve deeper and investigate the underlying drivers of the synchronization evoked during a collaborative task. By quantifying the group dynamics elicited during cooperative tasks, we can disentangle the neural mechanisms that occur among subjects and show which areas of the brain are most activated during cooperative group behavior. This paper quantified the levels of brain synchronization among subjects at the sensor location level during an EEG hyperscanning experiment where the groups were subjected to different tasks: resting state, individual task, and group cooperative task. The objective of the study was to investigate how the synchronization is distributed at an electrode-to-electrode level. By means of correlation component analysis, we confirmed an overall increase in inter-brain synchrony found across subjects when working in the cooperative task (inter-subject correlation (ISC) = 0.317) compared to the resting state (ISC = 0.164) and individual task (ISC = 0.127), however, when looking at the sensor projections of these inter-subject correlations there were no significant changes when contrasting the different task conditions.