School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
Institute of Brain and Education Innovation, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2022 Oct 3;17(10):956-964. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsac022.
Joint action is central to human nature, enabling individuals to coordinate in time and space to achieve a joint outcome. Such interaction typically involves two key elements: shared goal and action coordination. Yet, the substrates entrained to these two components in joint action remained unclear. In the current study, dyads performed two tasks involving both sharing goal and action coordination, i.e. complementary joint action and imitative joint action, a task only involving shared goal and a task only involving action coordination, while their brain activities were recorded by the functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning technique. The results showed that both complementary and imitative joint action (i.e. involving shared goal and action coordination) elicited better behavioral performance than the task only involving shared goal/action coordination. We observed that the interbrain synchronization (IBS) at the right inferior frontal cortex (IFC) entrained more to shared goal, while left-IFC IBS entrained more to action coordination. We also observed that the right-IFC IBS was greater during completing a complementary action than an imitative action. Our results suggest that IFC plays an important role in joint action, with distinct lateralization for the sub-components of joint action.
共同行动是人类本性的核心，使个体能够在时间和空间上协调，以实现共同的结果。这种相互作用通常涉及两个关键要素：共同目标和行动协调。然而，共同行动中涉及这两个组成部分的基质仍不清楚。在当前的研究中，二人组执行了两项涉及共同目标和行动协调的任务，即互补的共同行动和模仿的共同行动，一项仅涉及共同目标的任务和一项仅涉及行动协调的任务，同时记录了他们的大脑活动使用功能近红外光谱超扫描技术。结果表明，互补的和模仿的共同行动（即涉及共同目标和行动协调）比仅涉及共同目标/行动协调的任务产生了更好的行为表现。我们观察到，右侧下额叶皮层（IFC）的脑间同步（IBS）更多地与共同目标相关，而左侧 IFC 的 IBS 更多地与动作协调相关。我们还观察到，在完成互补动作时，右侧 IFC 的 IBS 比模仿动作更大。我们的研究结果表明，IFC 在共同行动中起着重要作用，共同行动的子成分具有明显的侧化。
