Brain-to-Brain Synchrony Tracks Real-World Dynamic Group Interactions in the Classroom
Suzanne Dikker Lu Wan Ido Davidesco Lisa Kaggen Matthias Oostrik James McClintock Jess Rowland Georgios Michalareas Jay J. Van Bavel Mingzhou Ding, David Poeppel
Overview: This very intriguing study uses mobile eeg to address the issue that social neuroscience is not really all the social. One person in the scanner or perhaps two people in a scanner does not a social experience make. This work measures brain synchrony across students in a classroom setting, an ecologically valid paradigm compared to many neuroimaging studies. The neural synchrony was used to try and predict engagement with the class and classroom social dynamics.
Methods: Participants - 12 high school students in a advanced biology classroom though really data was only analyzed from 10 students since two female students with problematic hair were excluded. Procedure - for 11 sessions eeg was recorded from the emotiv EPOC EEG headsets during the usual biology lesson. The students participated in four different types of learning, teacher reading aloud from notes, watching an educational video on the topic, teacher lecturing to the class, and a discussion of the class materials.
Measures - Students filled out a selection of measures on empathy, group affinity, and personal distress. Students also filled out pre and post class questionnaires on how much they enjoyed the class and how focused they were.
Neural synchrony - the emotiv headsets have 14 electrodes altogether. Neural synchrony was calculated by calculating total interdependence TI which was estimated by computing the magnitude squared coherence using the Welch method for 6 one-on-one paired combinations of electrodes from two subjects The magnitude squared coherence was calculated for the frequency range between 1 to 20 Hz by tapering non-overlapping 1s epochs TI for one pair of subjects was obtained by averaging TI values across all paired electrodes (Figure S3E) and student-to-group TI was obtained by averaging TI values over all possible pairwise combinations between that one student and the rest of the group.
Analysis - two way anovas and multilevel models were used to test the effect of teaching style on TI. TI was also related to empathy and social measures.
Results: There was a main effect of teaching style on both TI and student ratings, students preferred and showed more synchrony. Focused uniquely predicted synchrony above and beyond teaching style. Both group affinity and empathy predicted student-to-group synchrony independently of teaching style. Students showed the highest pairwise synchrony during class with their face-toface partner compared to the other two student pairings. Students who favorably rated the teacher showed smaller differences between video and lecture TI. The authors posit joint attention could account for a lot of this synchrony they examined the relationship between student-togroup synchrony and alpha band power—a well-characterized index of attention reduction in a student’s alpha oscillatory activity was accompanied by an increase in student-to-group alpha coherence.
Thoughts: This technology has some potential huge implications for educational neuroscience right? Or maybe not. The idea of neural synchrony seems interesting but how informative is it? Does it matter that this is kind of abstracted from being regionally localized to the brain if it is the same across individuals how much does that tell us?