Interactive brains: A systematic review and meta-analysis of methodological factors in hyperscanning studies in social contexts
Creators: name: Kidby, Sayaka
name: Dunn, Kirsty
name: Reid, Vincent
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: hyperscanning
subject: meta-analysis
subject: social cognition
subject: social interaction
subject: systematic review

description: Human cognition operates in relation to the dynamics of social interaction. It is repeatedly argued that brain mechanism and function underlying social interactions should be studied upon naturalistic social settings, rather than experimentally controlled laboratory environments (Hari &amp; Kujala, 2009; Schilbach et al., 2013). The introduction of hyperscanning techniques, which now broadly refer to methods of concurrently monitoring brain activities of two or more individuals in interactive contexts (Montague et al., 2002), has brought us closer to this aim of investigating neural networks supporting human dynamic social interactions. The last few decades have seen a surge of published papers in this domain. For instance, this technique has been used in research to uncover neural networks underlying joint musical activity (e.g. Babiloni et al., 2012), child-parent interaction (e.g. Nguyen et al., 2020; Piazza et al., 2019; Wass et al., 2018) or teacher-student interaction (Dikker et al., 2017). Although challenging, hyperscanning is feasible across different participant groups including children and infants, and can provide us with insights about human brain activity that specifically emerges within the context of dynamic and spontaneous social interaction. Yet there is large variation in methods and analyses, likely due to a focus on establishing the feasibility of hyperscanning in social contexts. Such variation present in the literature has left it difficult to assess how robust the effect of human inter-brain interaction is to a wide range of research factors that may influence the degree to which inter-brain connection happens. Now that methods of data acquisition and analysis in hyperscanning research have advanced and adequate numbers of empirical papers have been published, it is timely to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis to explore the validity of this approach. We review papers that utilized hyperscanning techniques and evaluated the association between brain activities of multiple individuals in interactional contexts. The search has been conducted using three electronic databases limiting the results to peer-reviewed journal articles published in English between 2002 and 2020. Studies with participants of all age groups will be included but not ones with non-human participants. A bibliographic search was also conducted to supplement the electronic search. It is expected that a systematic literature review will provide an overview of the trend in the literature and clarify the ways in which the current methodological and analytic factors vary. A meta-analysis will identify how each methodological factor, such as participant age, task settings, brain scanning measure and analysis used, may contribute to any variations in the effect size reported in existing studies. By being one of the first systematic reviews and meta-analyses on the topic, the proposed study will benefit the field by raising any critical issues about how future investigations should approach the question of neural mechanisms underlying human social interactions during development.