Dual brain stimulation enhances interpersonal learning through spontaneous movement synchrony

Yafeng Pan, Giacomo Novembre, Bei Song, Yi Zhu, Yi Hu
2020 Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience  
Social interactive learning denotes the ability to acquire new information from a conspecific-a prerequisite for cultural evolution and survival. As inspired by recent neurophysiological research, here we tested whether social interactive learning can be augmented by exogenously synchronizing oscillatory brain activity across an instructor and a learner engaged in a naturalistic song-learning task. We used a dual brain stimulation protocol entailing the trans-cranial delivery of synchronized
more » ... ctric currents in two individuals simultaneously. When we stimulated inferior frontal brain regions, with 6 Hz alternating currents being in-phase between the instructor and the learner, the dyad exhibited spontaneous and synchronized body movement. Remarkably, this stimulation also led to enhanced learning performance. These effects were both phase- and frequency-specific: 6 Hz anti-phase stimulation, or 10 Hz in-phase stimulation, did not yield comparable results. Furthermore, a mediation analysis disclosed that interpersonal movement synchrony acted as a partial mediator of the effect of dual brain stimulation on learning performance, i.e. possibly facilitating the effect of dual brain stimulation on learning. Our results provide a causal demonstration that inter-brain synchronization is a sufficient condition to improve real-time information transfer between pairs of individuals.
doi:10.1093/scan/nsaa080 pmid:32591830 pmcid:PMC7812617 fatcat:3p3qcjf4f5hsnl7blfxzf7fx7i