A unifying mechanism governing inter-brain neural relationship during social interactions
Abstract
A key goal of social neuroscience is to understand the inter-brain neural relationship - the relationship between the neural activity of socially interacting individuals. Decades of research investigating this relationship have focused on the similarity in neural activity across brains. Here we instead asked how neural activity differs between brains, and how that difference evolves alongside activity patterns shared between brains. Applying this framework to bats engaged in spontaneous social interactions revealed two complementary phenomena characterizing the inter-brain neural relationship: fast fluctuations of activity difference across brains unfolding in parallel with slow activity covariation across brains. A model reproduced these observations and generated multiple predictions that we confirmed using experimental data involving pairs of bats and a larger social group of bats. The model suggests that a simple computational mechanism involving positive and negative feedback could explain diverse experimental observations regarding the inter-brain neural relationship.
Data availability
Source code for the models is available at https://github.com/zhangwujie/Neurobat-lab-codes/tree/master/Interbrain-model
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (DP2-DC016163)
- Michael M Yartsev
Dana Foundation
- Michael M Yartsev
National Institute of Mental Health (1-R01MH25387-01)
- Michael M Yartsev
New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF-R-NI40)
- Michael M Yartsev
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (FG-2017-9646)
- Michael M Yartsev
Brain Research Foundation (BRFSG-2017-09)
- Michael M Yartsev
National Science Foundation (NSF- 1550818)
- Michael M Yartsev
Packard Fellowship (2017-66825)
- Michael M Yartsev
Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship
- Michael M Yartsev
Pew Charitable Trust (00029645)
- Michael M Yartsev
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Noah J Cowan, Johns Hopkins University, United States
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures complied with all relevant ethical regulations for animal testing and research and were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the University of California, Berkeley (protocol number AUP-2015-01-7122-2).
Version history
- Received: May 18, 2021
- Preprint posted: June 2, 2021 (view preprint)
- Accepted: February 8, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: February 10, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: March 24, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2022, Zhang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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