Interpersonal Agreement and Disagreement During Face-to-Face Dialogue: An fNIRS Investigation
Authors: J Adam Noah
Mark Tiede
Xian Zhang
Joy Hirsch
Maurice Biriotti
Alexandre Salama-Manteau
Journal: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2021)
Discipline: NEUROSCIENCE & BEHAVIOR
Keywords: acoustical analysis; adaptive models of language; agreement and disagreement; dynamic spoken language; hyperscanning
Affiliations: Brain Function Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, United States., Department of Neuroscience, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, United States., Department of Comparative Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, United States., Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT, United States., Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London, United Kingdom., Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University College London, London, United Kingdom.

Abstract:  Although the neural systems that underlie spoken language are well-known, how they adapt to evolving social cues during natural conversations remains an unanswered question. In this work we investigate the neural correlates of face-to-face conversations between two individuals using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and acoustical analyses of concurrent audio recordings. Nineteen pairs of healthy adults engaged in live discussions on two controversial topics where their opinions were either in agreement or disagreement. Participants were matched according to their a priori opinions on these topics as assessed by questionnaire. Acoustic measures of the recorded speech including the fundamental frequency range, median fundamental frequency, syllable rate, and acoustic energy were elevated during disagreement relative to agreement. Consistent with both the a priori opinion ratings and the acoustic findings, neural activity associated with long-range functional networks, rather than the canonical language areas, was also differentiated by the two conditions. Specifically, the frontoparietal system including bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left supramarginal gyrus, angular gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus showed increased activity while talking during disagreement. In contrast, talking during agreement was characterized by increased activity in a social and attention network including right supramarginal gyrus, bilateral frontal eye-fields, and left frontopolar regions. Further, these social and visual attention networks were more synchronous across brains during agreement than disagreement. Rather than localized modulation of the canonical language system, these findings are most consistent with a model of distributed and adaptive language-related processes including cross-brain neural coupling that serves dynamic verbal exchanges. 

Retracted: No

PubPeer comments:
 This article was reviewed on the error bar podcast episode 4: https: theerrorbar.com ?e=4 story 23: https: theerrorbar.com ?s=23. The review was done in the light of newspaper headlines about the article. The slightly-edited transcript is copied here: headline: ARGUING BRAINS REVEAL SOMETHING, MAYBE tweet: pairs of people had their brain activity recorded while taking turns to discuss controversial topics on which they agreed or disagreed. flaws in the experimental design render the results difficult to interpret. convince me otherwise. description: the psychologist Susan Pinker, writing in her column in the Wall St Journal, reports on a study of people having their brains scanned during discussions of controversial topics. the 19 familiar pairs were selected for agreeing on two, and disagreeing on two controversial political or social topics. they discussed these four topics, taking 15 seconds at a time in a carefully-orchestrated turn-taking discussion. while they did so, optical brain imaging was performed on both sides of their head. the data were separated according to whether the topic was one on which they agreed or disagreed, and whether they were currently talking or listening. the results revealed a number of (not very surprising) things - mostly that regions of the brain known to be involved in speaking and listening were activated during these conversations. evaluation: the study suffers from a fundamental flaw that makes it very difficult to compare the different experimental conditions - there was no baseline condition against which to compare each of the other conditions. so, while the authors talk about the neural correlates of talking or listening or agreeing or disagreeing , they can only really talk about the differences between talking and listening, or between agreeing and disagreeing. if this doesn t sound like a problem, then consider cheese. two people could both like cheddar cheese a little bit more than they like wensleydale cheese. but one of these people could really hate both cheeses, and the other could really love both cheeses. if we only look at the differences between cheddar and wensleyday, we can t tell if they actually like cheese. the brain is the same. so the study is unable to tell us, for example, if any brain areas are involved in both talking and listening, or both agreeing and disagreeing. all we know is that some brain areas do different things in the two conditions. but more importantly than the data, both the scientific and the Wall St Journal articles both claimed that you can t get two people into the same MRI scanner. not true. the first MRI of a heterosexual couple having actual sex was in 1999, the first custom two-person scanner was described in 2011, and there are dozens of articles on two person MRI. just alta vista it. conclusion: while the neural correlates of agreement and disagreement would be extremely interesting to the error bar, this study doesn t seem able to tell us much more than what we already know about talking and listening. ,