Inter-brain coupling reflects disciplinary differences in real-world classroom learning

Abstract

While it is widely acknowledged that different disciplines are associated with distinct characteristics that would require different learning strategies and approaches, how the disciplinary differences are manifested in students' daily learning process remain largely underexplored. The present study investigated the disciplinary differences from the framework of hard and soft disciplines, by recording thirty-four high-school students' EEGs simultaneously in real-classroom settings during their regular Chinese (a soft discipline) and Math (a hard discipline) courses across a whole semester. Inter-brain coupling analysis was conducted to identify the neural correlates of successful learning for different disciplines. One's theta-band inter-brain coupling to all their classmates during both the Chinese and the Math sessions was found to be positively correlated with their final exam scores of Math, while one's alpha-band inter-brain coupling to their excellent peers was positively correlated with their final exam scores of Chinese. These results demonstrated the value of inter-brain coupling for reflecting students' learning outcomes for both hard and soft disciplines and highlighted excellent peers as a good candidate to represent a successful learning process for soft disciplines. Our findings provided a piece of neuroscience evidence towards the understanding of disciplinary differences during real-world classroom learning.

How a speaker herds the audience: Multi-brain neural convergence over time during naturalistic storytelling

“…It is worth noting, however, that there may be different kinds of effective speech. For example, a speaker may seek to (mis)direct listeners toward a different understanding than their own; listeners that are unfamiliar versus experts with a particular topic may experience the same speech very differently 10,14 ; and a speaker may attempt to "meet certain listeners where they are" rather than wrangling all listeners similarly. The methodology we introduce takes into account both LL and SL couplings in a moment-bymoment manner.…”

“…The efficacy of a given narrative has been shown to vary across individuals. Both higher LL neural coupling and higher SL neural coupling have been separately associated with better behavioral estimates of speech comprehension across individuals 4,5,7,[9][10][11][12][12][13][14][15][16][16][17][18] . Individuals performing better in the post-test often showed higher neural coupling with the speaker or other listeners.…”

“…The efficacy of a given narrative has been shown to vary across individuals. Both higher LL neural coupling and higher SL neural coupling have been separately associated with better behavioral estimates of speech comprehension across individuals (Stephens et al, 2010; Zadbood et al, 2017; Cohen et al, 2018; Zheng et al, 2018; Davidesco et al, 2019, 2019; Liu et al, 2019, 2022; Pan et al, 2020; Meshulam et al, 2021; Nguyen et al, 2022; Zhang et al, 2022, 2022; Zhu et al, 2022; Chen et al, 2023). Individuals performing better in the post-test often showed higher neural coupling with the speaker or other listeners.…”

Compensatory Mechanisms for Preserving Speech-in-Noise Comprehension Involve Prefrontal Cortex in Older Adults

“…Importantly, the strength of the speaker-listener neural coupling was associated with the listener's comprehension of the speech (30)(31)(32), suggesting the speaker-listener neural coupling as the inter-brain neural mechanisms of natural speech comprehension and communication (22,33). In this way, the analysis of speakerlistener neural coupling circumvents the challenges of directly modeling the relationship between neural responses and natural speech (26,34), and holds promise for unravelling the neural foundation of natural speech-in-noise comprehension from an inter-brain perspective (26). Our prior work demonstrated that in young listeners, neural activities of the broad language regions were coupled with the speakers, even in noisy conditions.…”

Student-teacher inter-brain coupling causally predict academic achievement over semesters

“…However, these studies are predominantly conducted in controlled laboratory settings, which may not fully capture the complexities of real-world classroom dynamics, thus limiting their ecological validity (Sonkusare et al, 2019;van Atteveldt et al, 2018). With the development of wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) and guided by the perspective of inter-brain coupling, recent hyperscanning studies have begun to move towards real-world classroom scenarios, primarily focus on inter-brain coupling among students (Chen, Qian, et al, 2023;Chen, Xu, et al, 2023;Davidesco et al, 2019;Dikker et al, 2017). The portability, ease of use, and low operational cost of wearable EEG devices are anticipated to facilitate the longitudinal recording of data in classroom settings, providing a rich, comprehensive description and analysis of learning processes.…”