LEARNing IN social interaction and the role of inter-brain SYNChrony

Social interaction plays a pivotal role in human learning across the lifespan. Research shows that learning in social interaction co-occurs with inter-personal neural synchrony (INS), i.e. the temporal alignment of teacher-learner and learner-learner brain activities. In addition, some have proposed that INS may actively facilitate learning. However, previous work i) does not identify the specific social contextual factors responsible for the emergence of learning, INS and the INS-learning association and ii) provides mainly correlational rather than causal evidence of the INS-learning association. LEARNINSYNC aims to overcome these limitations. It combines EEG hyperscanning and multi-person transcranial electric stimulation (tES) to i) identify the specific social contextual factors contributing to learning, INS and INS-learning association and ii) test whether INS causally promotes learning. Experiment 1 adopts a 2x2 design where two participants (learners) learn from a third one (teacher) in social contexts varying the co-presence of the other learner (present or absent) and the teaching contingency (live or recorded). During the learning stage, EEG signals are measured from all three participants. This will characterise inter-brain dynamics across three people, moving beyond predominant dyadic literature and closer to real-world group learning. Experiment 2 tests the causal role of INS in learning: it exogenously induces teacher-learner and learner-learner INS during the learning stage, by mirroring the neural signals’ frequency, phase, and topography observed in experiment 1, and compares learning after real vs sham stimulation. Understanding the causal role of INS in social learning will inform current theories of INS and models of social and educational neuroscience. In a world where remote and asynchronous learning is increasingly prevalent, this work carries societal impact in the development of interventions for educational and work settings.