Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Beyond Physical Entrainment: Competitive And Cooperative Mental Stances During Identical Joint-Action Tasks Differently Affect Inter-Subjective Neural Synchrony And Judgments Of Agency, Philip S. Cho, Nicolas Escoffier, Yinan Mao, Christopher Green, Richard C. Davis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Little work has examined how mental stance alone, apart from physical entrainment, affects between-participant neural synchrony during joint social interaction. We report the first findings on how cooperative and competitive mental stances, even during identical visuomotor joint-action tasks, result in distinct neural oscillatory signatures in low beta and theta band between-participant phase synchrony. Two participants jointly controlled a cursor and were instructed to either compete or cooperate to move it to one of three targets. The visuomotor output was identical for both the compete and cooperate conditions because participants were privately given the same target for experimental trials. Cooperation enhanced …