Prior physical synchrony enhances rapport and inter-brain synchronization during subsequent educational communication

Abstract

Physical synchrony has been suggested to have positive effects on not only concurrent but also subsequent communication, but the underlying neural processes are unclear.Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning, we tested the effects of preceding physical synchrony on subsequent dyadic teaching-learning communication. Thirty-two pairs of participants performed two experimental sessions.In each session, they underwent a rhythmic arm movement block with synchronous or asynchronous conditions, and then taught/learned unknown words to/from each other according to a given scenario. Neural activities in their medial and left lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) were measured and inter-brain synchronization (IBS) during the teachinglearning blocks was evaluated. Participants rated their subjective rapport during the teaching-learning blocks, and took a word memory test. The analyses revealed that (1) prior physical synchrony enhanced teacher-learner rapport; (2) prior physical synchrony also enhanced IBS in the lateral PFC; and (3) IBS changes correlated positively with rapport changes. Physical synchrony did however not affect word memory performance.These results suggest that IBS can be useful to measure the effects of social-bonding facilitation activities for educational communication.

What has social neuroscience learned from hyperscanning studies of spoken communication? A systematic review

“…Nevertheless, Liu et al (2019) found IBS in the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) and not in the right TPJ (rTPJ) when comparing face-to-face and computer-mediated communication conditions. In a context of participants engaged in prior physical synchrony, Nozawa et al (2019) reported that IBS in the PFC region between teacher and learner was enhanced and positively associated with teacher learner rapport. Finally, neural alignment regarding alpha-band wave activity was detected for listeners in the frontal region and speakers in the central region and with respect to the theta band in the temporal region for the listener and frontal region for the speaker (Pérez et al, 2017).…”

“…In addition to determining alignment following WTC, Pan et al (2020) Of ten studies assessing the brain activity involved in knowledge sharing, three were carried out using EEG, while the rest were performed with fNIRS ( Table 1). The cortical regions activated and exhibiting IBS while sharing knowledge include frontal (Holper et al, 2013;Liu et al, 2019;Nozawa et al, 2019;Pan et al, 2018), temporal-parietal (Zheng et al, 2018), and frontal and temporal-parietal (Bevilacqua et al, 2019;Dikker et al, 2017;Pan et al, 2020;Pérez et al, 2017) areas. In a classroom study by Dikker et al (2017), IBS emerged from averaged neural activity over a variety of cortical regions between students which was greatest during interactive class discussion compared to lecture, reading, and video conditions.…”

“…The findings suggest that learning that occurs through social interaction goes beyond merely transmitting information to include recognizing emotional expressions (Carr et al, 2003;Gallese et al, 2004), facilitating communication (Holper et al, 2013;Pan et al, 2018), and developing rapport (Nozawa et al, 2019). Knowledge sharing via verbal communication stimulates entrainment at both the brain-to-speech envelope level and the brain-to-brain level (Dumas et al, 2010;Pérez et al, 2017) Similarly, turn-taking verbal interactions focus on speech rhythms involving interlocutors not only engaging in the content and context of the discourse, but also coordinating duration, J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f interval, rate, and timing of their interaction (Kawasaki et al, 2013).…”

Capturing Human Interaction in the Virtual Age: A Perspective on the Future of fNIRS Hyperscanning

“…As shown in Figure 1 , the distribution of hyperscan conditions dedicated to each of the nine categories defined by our framework is highly unequal. Over half of all reported hyperscan conditions (57.8%, N = 87) were conducted when the interacting dyad were in the same room without any means of digital interaction (i.e., Analog ToI) (Funane et al, 2011 ; Holper et al, 2012 , 2013 ; Jiang et al, 2012 , 2015 ; Osaka et al, 2014 , 2015 ; Duan et al, 2015 ; Liu N et al, 2016 ; Nozawa et al, 2016 , 2019 ; Hirsch et al, 2017 , 2018 ; Ikeda et al, 2017 ; Zhang et al, 2017a , b ; Zhao et al, 2017 ; Dai et al, 2018a , b ; Fishburn et al, 2018 ; Pan et al, 2018 , 2020a ; Xue et al, 2018 ; Zhang Y et al, 2018 ; Lu et al, 2019 , 2020 ; Mayseless et al, 2019 ; Niu et al, 2019 ; Vanzella et al, 2019 ; Noah et al, 2020 ), while (42.4%, N = 64) included some element of technology (e.g., playing a computer game) while participants were in the same room (Cui et al, 2012 ; Dommer et al, 2012 ; Duan et al, 2013 ; Cheng et al, 2015 , 2019 ; Liu T et al, 2015 , 2016 , 2017 ; Baker et al, 2016 ; Tang et al, 2016 ; Balconi and Vanutelli, 2017a , b ; Hu et al, 2017 ; Pan et al, 2017 , 2020b ; Piva et al, 2017 ; Takeuchi et al, 2017 ; Fishburn et al, 2018 ; Zhang M et al, 2018 ; Zheng et al, 2018 , 2020 ; Balconi et al, 2019 ; Liu et al, 2019 ; Nozawa et al, 2019 ; Sarinasadat et al, 2019a …”

“…However, the classification of the comparisons reported were limited to Analog vs. Mixed and Inter-ToI comparisons. The studies comprised comparisons between Mixed ToI/Joint goal-driven ToC and Mixed ToI/Mixed ToC ( N = 5) (Cui et al, 2012 ; Cheng et al, 2015 ; Liu T et al, 2015 , 2016 , 2017 ), Analog ToI/Mixed ToC and Analog ToI/Joint goal-driven ToC ( N = 7) (Jiang et al, 2012 ; Holper et al, 2013 ; Osaka et al, 2014 , 2015 ; Hirsch et al, 2018 ; Niu et al, 2019 ; Vanzella et al, 2019 ), Analog ToI/Joint open-ended ToC and Analog ToI/Joint goal-driven ToC ( N = 3) (Liu N et al, 2016 ; Ikeda et al, 2017 ; Zhang Y et al, 2018 ), and Analog ToI/Mixed ToC and Mixed ToI/Joint goal-driven ToC ( N = 2) (Nozawa et al, 2019 ; Noah et al, 2020 ). Two studies included three cross-condition comparisons, including comparisons between Analog ToI/Mixed ToC, Analog ToI/Joint goal-driven ToC, and Mixed ToI/Joint open-ended ToC ( N = 1) (Fishburn et al, 2018 ), as well as between Analog ToI/Joint goal-driven ToC, Analog ToI/Joint open-ended ToC, and Mixed ToI/Joint goal-driven ToC ( N = 1) (Yang et al, 2020 ).…”