A hierarchical model for interpersonal verbal communication

Abstract

The ability to use language makes us human. For decades, researchers have been racking their minds to understand the relation between language and the human brain. Nevertheless, most previous neuroscientific research has investigated this issue from a “single-brain” perspective, thus neglecting the nature of interpersonal communication through language. With the development of modern hyperscanning techniques, researchers have begun probing the neurocognitive processes underlying interpersonal verbal communication and have examined the involvement of interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) in communication. However, in most cases, the neurocognitive processes underlying INS are obscure. To tentatively address this issue, we propose herein a hierarchical model based on findings from a growing amount of hyperscanning research. We suggest that three levels of neurocognitive processes are primarily involved in interpersonal verbal communication and are closely associated with distinctive patterns of INS. Different levels of these processes modulate each other bidirectionally. Furthermore, we argued that two processes (shared representation and interpersonal predictive coding) might coexist and work together at each level to facilitate successful interpersonal verbal communication. We hope this model will inspire further innovative research in several directions within the fields of social and cognitive neuroscience.

Proximity and Touch are associated with Neural but not Physiological Synchrony in Naturalistic Mother-Infant Interactions

“…A growing body of evidence indicates that interacting partners show INS during various social contexts, such as cooperation, conversation or joint musical activities (Czeszumski et al, 2020;Dumas et al, 2011;Hasson et al, 2012;Jiang, Zheng, & Lu, 2020). In the developmental domain, the present study is the first study to date that provides evidence for INS in infants, as young as 4 months of age, and their primary caregiver.…”

A Guide to Parent-Child fNIRS Hyperscanning Data Processing and Analysis

“…This is because when computing coherence between channels with different anatomical locations in the assessed individuals, results can be difficult to interpret without clear a-priori hypotheses. The above said, such an approach can yield meaningful results, for instance, if activity in a speaker's brain regions associated with speech production is linked with a listener's activity in regions associated with speech perception [43].…”

Being ‘in sync’—is interactional synchrony the key to understanding the social brain?

“…leads/lags) should be considered and mathematically modeled. This is especially important as differences in the alignment of two time series may be of functional significance ( Jiang et al , this issue ).…”

“…Towards this end, the present collection of papers makes an initial effort by providing insightful reviews of study approaches and findings ( Hoehl et al , this issue ; Jiang et al , this issue ; Levy et al , this issue ; Misaki et al , this issue ), empirically linking different synchrony measures ( Pan et al , this issue ; Sciaraffa et al , this issue ) and by introducing a new python-based software package that can help with standardizing data analysis ( Ayrolles et al , this issue ). However, more work is needed.…”

“…One interesting issue here is whether and to what extent we should consider the alignment of temporal patterns from different sources. This seems a critical step in analyzing the coordination of neural activity between individuals, for instance, in verbal conversation, when neural activity in auditory cortices of the listener aligns with activity in articulatory motor areas of the speaker ( Jiang et al , this issue ). But how meaningful is it for other source combinations (e.g.…”