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Intracranial EEG recordings of inter-individual communication
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Poster C16 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Anais Llorens1,2,3, Athina Tzovara4,5, Julian Weyermann4, Sigurd Alnes4, Olivia Kim-Mac Manus6,7, Arjen Stolk8,9, Ignacio Saez10, Robert T Knight3,11; 1Université de Franche-Comté, SUPMICROTECH, CNRS, institut FEMTO-ST, F-25000 Besançon, France, 2Institut de Psychiatrie et Neurosciences de Paris-IPNP, INSERM 1266, Université de Paris, Paris, France, 3Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA, 4Institute for Computer Science, University of Bern, Switzerland, 5Sleep Wake Epilepsy Center | NeuroTec,Department of Neurology, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, University Bern, Switzerland, 6Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA, 7Division of Neurology, Rady Children’s Hospital, San Diego, CA, USA, 8Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA, 9Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 10Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, NY, USA, 11Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Interpersonal communication allows exchange of knowledge and creation of new concepts, by forming predictions about the intentions of others. Studying the neural basis of human interpersonal interaction is challenging. Here, we introduce a novel experimental approach based on dual intracranial EEG (iEEG) with excellent spatiotemporal resolution. We developed a novel task assessing how categorical representations are refined by interacting with one another. We hypothesized that cognitive alignment will result in interbrain correlations, in a hierarchy of brain regions involved in decision-making and social interaction. We further hypothesized that successful and unsuccessful communications will modulate interbrain synchrony in distinct brain networks. We simultaneously recorded iEEG data from pairs of patients (PoP) undergoing presurgical evaluation for medication refractory epilepsy at the same hospital when their iEEG exploration were overlapping. We created a communication task where both patients assumed the roles of sender/receiver in alternating order. The sender’s goal is to communicate features about an item (animal or object) by adjusting two axes (about size, texture, environment, or noisiness). The receiver tries to guess which of the two combined items (an animal and an object) the sender is describing. Feedback at the end of each trial is provided. We recorded 569 electrodes across four PoP (from 47 to 141 per patient) for a total of 317 trials across all PoP. To study synchrony, we extracted local field potentials (LFP; 1-20Hz), evaluated responsive electrodes, and tested the correlation between pairs of electrodes across PoP. We compared correct versus incorrect trials at the trial onset, i.e., when communication is initiated, and at feedback presentation, i.e., after communication has ended. Our results show that all PoP performed the task successfully (~81% of correct trials). We found that the number of electrodes with a strong inter-patient synchrony decreases in all four PoP between the onset of the communication (x = .075) and its end (x = .055) (p < 0.05). At the trial onset, the pairs of electrodes neurally coupled across the patient pairs were different for trials that were later correct, or incorrect. At the feedback period, we found pairs of electrodes with strong neural correlations in response to correct but not incorrect feedback. These results show that during communication; 1) brain synchrony manifests across multiple brain regions, 2) fades out as communication ends, 3) neural alignment differs between successful vs. unsuccessful communication. Thanks to these encouraging results, a wireless version of this experiment is currently being developed in order to record PoP across sites.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Meaning: Lexical Semantics