Neural Mechanisms Underlying Joint Action

Date

2023-9-05

Author

Usal, Kerem Alp

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The ability to engage in joint attention and perform joint actions is crucial for social life, and therefore an indispensable attribute of human cognition. It is common in everyday life that people need to perform an action together, which is called a joint action. Joint action requires extra effort compared to individual action, such as sharing mental representations, coordination, predicting partner’s behavior, entrainment and perception-action matching. The setting of joint action, whether it is cooperative or competitive, affects participants’ performance as well. The cognitive mechanisms underlying joint action between individuals are still under research. In this study, changes in neural activation during a social condition were investigated with hyperscanning, using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) as participants first performed the same task individually and then as a dyad. Sixty-two participants were tested in thirty- one dyads with a dual version of the n-back task. The findings generally indicated that there was a positive correlation between the n-back level and reaction times, heart rate, and oxygenation change across the PFC; whereas task accuracy and heart rate variability decreased with the n-back level. The effect of social presence was in general smaller than the effect of task difficulty and hinted towards a lower mental workload during the social task condition. The interbrain connectivity of the participants changed with the task difficulty.

Subject Keywords

EEG, fNIRS, Neural Mechanisms, Hyperscanning, Social Cognition

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105417

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Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis