Ricerc@Sapienza

A large variety of everyday actions take place in a social context that needs to be shared by interacting agents. However, current neuroscientific models of interpersonal motor interactions mainly focus on individual motor performance. The goal of the present project is to model the exquisitely interactive nature of social communication based on non-verbal exchange of information via bodily movements. We will investigate motor interactions in real life contexts by recording simultaneously the action kinematics of participants engaged in cooperative tasks (either with a virtual avatar or between two individuals jointly grasping an object) and their brains' electrical activity with a Electroencephalography (EEG) system.
Our experimental choices to couple EEG and kinematics recordings offer a great opportunity to study the dynamics of social neuromarkers at the body and brain level.
This approach may pave the way to new studies on the cortical and cognitive basis of interactive motor behaviors and bidirectional social interaction. We aspire to better seize the social complexity and to give a greater overview of brain-behavior dynamics and generate a better understanding of social interaction in cooperative collaboration. Thus, the proposed research may have fundamental importance at both theoretical and empirical levels.