A comparative study on inter-brain synchrony in real and virtual environments using hyperscanning

I. Gumilar , E. Sareen , R. Bell , A. Stone , A. F. Hayati , J. Mao , A. Barde , A. Gupta , A. Dey , G. A. Lee , M. Billinghurst

Comput. Graph.

Inter-brain synchrony — when collaborators' neural activity aligns — had been studied in the real world but not in VR. Across three pilot studies, paired participants performed finger-pointing and finger-tracking exercises in both real and virtual settings while their brain activity was recorded with EEG. Using phase-locking-value analysis, VR was found to induce synchrony similar to the real world and to activate the same brain areas — and, notably, changing visual perspective in VR was itself able to elicit synchrony, marking VR as a promising platform for studying the neuroscience of human communication.

@article{gumilar2021,
  author    = {I. Gumilar and E. Sareen and R. Bell and A. Stone and A. F. Hayati and J. Mao and A. Barde and A. Gupta and A. Dey and G. A. Lee and M. Billinghurst},
  title     = {A comparative study on inter-brain synchrony in real and virtual environments using hyperscanning},
  journal = {Comput. Graph.},
  volume    = {94},
  pages     = {62-75},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.cag.2020.10.003},
  year      = {2021}
}