Communicating via Video Chat Reduces Inter-Brain Synchrony
Post by Lani Cupo
The takeaway
Synchronous brain activity between mothers and their young adolescent children is impacted when they are communicating via video chat compared to face-to-face. While communicating over video chat, there was reduced inter-brain synchrony.
What's the science?
Technologically-assisted communication (i.e. video chat or videoconferencing) has become especially prominent over the past few years as constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work, and living far from home necessitate people to connect virtually. Many have reported that connections do not feel the same, or that they experience “Zoom fatigue” after long days on video calls, which may be a result of disruptions to the inter-brain synchrony that underlies human social communication. There is mounting concern that children and adolescents may be especially susceptible to the increased exertion of telecommunication, however, more research is required to investigate the impact of technological communication on developing brains. This week in NeuroImage Schwartz and colleagues used electroencephalograms (EEG) on two brains (mothers and their adolescents) during face-to-face and video chat communications, comparing the synchrony between both conditions.
How did they do it?
140 people (70 mother-child pairs) participated in the study, which took place before the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors filmed all sessions and recorded brain activity from participants with EEG during three conditions: rest, where both participants were in the same room, facing a wall, but not interacting, face-to-face, where participants were in the same room, facing each other, and video chat, where participants were in two separate rooms, communicating through a computer screen. In both interaction conditions, the participants were instructed to discuss a positive topic, either planning a camping trip or planning an amusement park visit. The authors recorded EEG from both the mother and child continuously throughout the experiment. They used a previously defined method of calculating inter-brain connectivity (weighted phase lag index), a technique that aims to reduce correlated noise between participants’ brains that may be caused by shared noise sources, such as sensory stimuli. This is especially important for this study because even in a controlled environment, sensory stimuli in the face-to-face condition may be more similar than in the video-chat condition because participants are in the same room with the same noise sources. The authors also investigated behavioral metrics during both interaction conditions using the well-validated Coding Interactive Behavior manual (CIB). Finally, gaze direction was estimated from the video recordings, coded as either to person, to object, aversion, or unfocused.
What did they find?
Compared to baseline, both face-to-face and video chat communication increased inter-brain connectivity, while rest did not. However, inter-brain connectivity was most enhanced in the face-to-face communication condition, compared to the video chat condition. More specifically, the authors examined 36 possible brain connections between the mother and child’s regions of interest (ROIs). Comparing face-to-face to rest connectivity, they found greater inter-brain connectivity in 9 ROI connections. These ROIs could be categorized into four subgroups, most notably a) both homolog and cross-hemisphere linkage between the mother’s frontal and child’s temporal regions, b) mother’s right frontal region connecting with each of the child's ROIs, and c) the child’s temporal region connecting with mother's frontal and temporal regions. Conducting the same analysis between video chat and rest conditions, the authors report only a single significant connection between the mother’s right frontal and the child’s left temporal regions. This pair of analyses underscore the importance of the mother’s right frontal and child’s left temproal connectivity in mother-child social interactions. Comparing the social communication conditions directly, the authors found a significant difference between groups. Finally, during the face-to-face condition, but not the video chat condition, temporal-temporal synchrony was associated with the mother and child looking at each other, and mother-right-frontal-child-left-temporal connection was associated with the child being empathically engaged.
What's the impact?
This study found that social interaction between mother and child induces synchrony between brain activity in both participants, however, the method of interaction impacts connectivity, with greater synchrony during face-to-face interaction than video chatting or rest. These findings lend insight into the neural processes underlying social communication and highlight a need for future studies to investigate how inter-brain connectivity may change with changing technology.
