Investigating short windows of interbrain synchrony: A step toward fNIRS-based hyperfeedback

Social interaction is of fundamental importance to humans. Prior research has highlighted the link between interbrain synchrony and positive outcomes in human social interaction. Neurofeedback is an established method to train one’s brain activity and might offer a possibility to increase interbrain synchrony, too. Consequently, it would be advantageous to determine the feasibility of creating a neurofeedback system for enhancing interbrain synchrony to benefit human interaction. One vital step toward developing a neurofeedback setup is to determine whether the target metric can be determined in relatively short time windows. In this study, we investigated whether the most widely employed metric for interbrain synchrony, wavelet transform coherence, can be assessed accurately in short time windows using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is recognized for its mobility and ecological suitability for interactive research. To this end, we have undertaken a comprehensive approach where we created artificial data of different noise levels of a dyadic interaction and re-processed two human-interaction datasets. For both artificial and in vivo data, we computed short windows of interbrain synchrony of varying size and assessed significance at each window size. Our findings indicate that relatively short windows of wavelet transform coherence of integration durations of about 1 minute are feasible. This would align well with the methodology of an intermittent neurofeedback procedure. Our investigation lays a foundational step toward an fNIRS-based system to measure interbrain synchrony in real time and provide participants with information about their interbrain synchrony. This advancement is crucial for the future development of a neurofeedback training system tailored to enhance interbrain synchrony to potentially benefit human interaction.