Hitachi, Ltd., Central Research Laboratory, Hatoyama, Saitama 350-0395, Japan.
J Biomed Opt. 2011 Jul;16(7):077011. doi: 10.1117/1.3602853.
The brain activity during cooperation as a form of social process is studied. We investigate the relationship between coinstantaneous brain-activation signals of multiple participants and their cooperative-task performance. A wearable near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system is used for simultaneously measuring the brain activities of two participants. Each pair of participants perform a cooperative task, and their relative changes in cerebral blood are measured with the NIRS system. As for the task, the participants are told to count 10 s in their mind after an auditory cue and press a button. They are also told to adjust the timing of their button presses to make them as synchronized as possible. Certain information, namely, the "intertime interval" between the two button presses of each participant pair and which of the participants was the faster, is fed back to the participants by a beep sound after each trial. When the spatiotemporal covariance between the activation patterns of the prefrontal cortices of each participant is higher, the intertime interval between their button-press times was shorter. This result suggests that the synchronized activation patterns of the two participants' brains are associated with their performance when they interact in a cooperative task.
研究了合作作为一种社会过程的大脑活动。我们调查了多个参与者的同时脑激活信号与其合作任务表现之间的关系。使用可穿戴近红外光谱 (NIRS) 系统同时测量两个参与者的大脑活动。每对参与者执行合作任务，并使用 NIRS 系统测量其大脑血液的相对变化。在任务中，参与者被要求在听觉提示后在脑海中数 10 秒，然后按下按钮。他们还被告知调整按钮按下的时间，以使它们尽可能同步。在每次试验后，通过蜂鸣声向参与者反馈某些信息，即每个参与者对按钮按下的“间隔时间”以及哪个参与者更快。当每个参与者的前额叶皮质的激活模式之间的时空协方差更高时，他们的按钮按下时间之间的间隔时间更短。这一结果表明，当两个参与者的大脑同步激活模式与他们在合作任务中相互作用时的表现相关。
