TY - JOUR
T1 - Brain interaction during cooperation
T2 - Evaluating local properties of multiple-brain network
AU - Sciaraffa, Nicolina
AU - Borghini, Gianluca
AU - Aricò, Pietro
AU - Di Flumeri, Gianluca
AU - Colosimo, Alfredo
AU - Bezerianos, Anastasios
AU - Thakor, Nitish V.
AU - Babiloni, Fabio
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is co-financed by the European Commission by Horizon2020 projects Sesar-01-2015 Automation in ATM, “STRESS”, GA n. 699381 and Sesar-06-2015 High Performing Airport Operations, “MOTO”, GA n. 699379. The grant provided by the Italian Minister of University and Education under the PRIN 2012, GA n. 2012WAANZJ scheme to F.B. is also gratefully acknowledged.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
PY - 2017/7/21
Y1 - 2017/7/21
N2 - Subjects’ interaction is the core of most human activities. This is the reason why a lack of coordination is often the cause of missing goals, more than individual failure. While there are different subjective and objective measures to assess the level of mental effort required by subjects while facing a situation that is getting harder, that is, mental workload, to define an objective measure based on how and if team members are interacting is not so straightforward. In this study, behavioral, subjective and synchronized electroencephalographic data were collected from couples involved in a cooperative task to describe the relationship between task difficulty and team coordination, in the sense of interaction aimed at cooperatively performing the assignment. Multiple-brain connectivity analysis provided information about the whole interacting system. The results showed that averaged local properties of a brain network were affected by task difficulty. In particular, strength changed significantly with task difficulty and clustering coefficients strongly correlated with the workload itself. In particular, a higher workload corresponded to lower clustering values over the central and parietal brain areas. Such results has been interpreted as less efficient organization of the network when the subjects’ activities, due to high workload tendencies, were less coordinated.
AB - Subjects’ interaction is the core of most human activities. This is the reason why a lack of coordination is often the cause of missing goals, more than individual failure. While there are different subjective and objective measures to assess the level of mental effort required by subjects while facing a situation that is getting harder, that is, mental workload, to define an objective measure based on how and if team members are interacting is not so straightforward. In this study, behavioral, subjective and synchronized electroencephalographic data were collected from couples involved in a cooperative task to describe the relationship between task difficulty and team coordination, in the sense of interaction aimed at cooperatively performing the assignment. Multiple-brain connectivity analysis provided information about the whole interacting system. The results showed that averaged local properties of a brain network were affected by task difficulty. In particular, strength changed significantly with task difficulty and clustering coefficients strongly correlated with the workload itself. In particular, a higher workload corresponded to lower clustering values over the central and parietal brain areas. Such results has been interpreted as less efficient organization of the network when the subjects’ activities, due to high workload tendencies, were less coordinated.
KW - Cooperation
KW - EEG
KW - Human interaction
KW - Hyperscanning
KW - Mental workload
KW - Multiple-brain connectivity
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U2 - 10.3390/brainsci7070090
DO - 10.3390/brainsci7070090
M3 - Article
C2 - 28753986
AN - SCOPUS:85026295639
SN - 2076-3425
VL - 7
JO - Brain Sciences
JF - Brain Sciences
IS - 7
M1 - 90
ER -