Dual EEG alignment between participants during shared intentionality experiments

Abstract

Electroencephalograph (EEG) analysis from human subjects have demonstrated that beta oscillations carried perceptual information across the cortex featuring amplitude and phase modulation occurrences when subjects are engaged in task-oriented activities. A hypothesis was tested that synchronized patterns could be found in the scalp EEG of two human subjects engaged in similar intentional activity. Signals were recorded from scalp electrodes and band-pass filtered. The Hilbert transform decomposes the EEG signals into the analytic phase and amplitude. With these components of the EEG signal, a systematic search of the alpha, beta, delta, gamma, and theta spectrum is executed to locate temporal patterns. The amplitude and phase modulation were classified with respect to task intervals. Temporal patterns were found in the alpha-beta range (15-30 Hz). Our results suggest that the scalp EEG can yield information about the timing of episodically synchronized brain activity in higher cognitive function between two individuals engaged in similar task-oriented activities.

Keywords: Amplitude modulation (AM); Cross spectral coherence; Maximal information coefficient (MIC) analysis; Maximum asymmetry score (MAS); Shared intentionality; Social Neuroscience.