Interpersonal neural entrainment during early social interaction

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At the moment, most of what we know about how the developing brain functions during social interaction comes from studies that look at individual humans in isolation. This is paradoxical of course, and it has come about purely for practical reasons: most neuroimaging setups can only record from one brain at once, and so almost everything that we know comes from studies that presented social stimuli (such as pictures of faces) to infants while they were passively viewing them on a screen. We already know from other studies that there are a number of differences between which brain regions are active during social interaction, that illustrate the importance of studying social interaction in ecologically valid contexts. For example, mentalizing and reward networks show markedly different patterns of activity during live interaction, compared to when passively viewing equivalent social stimuli on a screen. But one thing that we don't know very much about is how interpersonal influences alters the dynamics of how information is shared between brains during early social interaction. 

In a review just out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, we look at this. We start from ostensive cues and contingent responsiveness - on the basis that this is probably where most people start their thinking when they think about social interaction during infancy! And we argue that, whereas the uni-directional neural correlates of both - i.e. how one partner transiently influences the other, with both partners considered independently – are fairly well understood, our understanding of how ostensive cues and contingent responsiveness alter the interpersonal neural dynamics of the interaction – i.e., how the partners inter-relate to one another - is currently limited. 

We also review the - currently fairly limited! - research that has looked at it the way that (we!) think it ought to be done - by recording from two brains concurrently, during social interaction. There really isn't much work out there at the moment that has - so there's a fair amount of speculation! And discussions about questions that we could look at in future. You can read the article if you want to find out more...

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