Covert and spontaneous brain to brain interactions during memorization of simultaneous images

Poster Session B - Sunday, April 14, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Samuel Calmels^1,2 (samuel.calmels@mail.mcgill.ca), Antoine Bou Khalil^1,2, Aidan Schottler-Raymond^1,2, Natan Courchesne^1,2, J. Bruno Debruille^1,2; ¹McGill University, ²Douglas Institute of Mental Health

Many times, science starts by reporting facts that cannot be explained. This is the aim of the present work. With methods that have been refined for 10 years our goal is to see whether one can definitely confirm surprising facts. Two previous works report that the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) that are evoked by presenting a picture to a participant can be modulated by simultaneously and privately presenting a picture to a partner. A reprocessing of the data of these works showed that these modulations existed only, or mostly, in precise circumstances, which were then copyrighted. A new experiment was thus run only in those circumstances to make sure simple and robust effects can be replicated in those precise circumstances. We recorded the ERPs evoked by presenting, at each trial, the photograph of a face to the participants. Simultaneously and again, privately, we presented the same face or a different one to the partner. (S)he was in an adjacent room and could not communicate with the participant. The ERPs of these partner-participants were found to strongly depend on the sameness of the two photographs, unbeknownst to them. These joint processing effects (JPEs) confirm that a simple and robust method can be used to study the sensitivity of the human brain to the brain activity of another person. This should help future works answering the many questions raised by this sensitivity, starting with the nature of the physical phenomenon at stake.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Person perception