Pre-lecture Social Interaction Affects Teacher-Student Neural Coupling and Eye Movement Synchronization during Lecture

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Yingying Peng¹ (20113471r@connect.polyu.hk), Samuel A Nastase², Yuhan Huang¹, Minghua Wu¹, Yuxi Li³, Ping Li¹; ¹The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, ²Princeton University, ³The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Lack of teacher-student interaction in online learning hampers students’ learning experience and outcomes as indicated by post-pandemic surveys (e.g., Reed, 2020). Existing research highlights the impact of perceived social closeness on teacher-student neural synchrony during face-to-face lectures (Bevilacqua et al., 2019), a factor linked to learning success (Nguyen et al., 2022). Yet, the effect of social interactions on teacher-student neural synchrony and learning outcomes in online settings remains uncharted. This research aims to address this gap. The teacher’s audio, eye movement and neural responses were recorded in the scanner when delivering a 17-minute lecture. A corresponding video lecture was created with the extracted audio. Two groups of college students (N=26) participated in video learning in the MRI scanner where their real-time neural responses and eye movement were also simultaneously recorded. Before viewing, one group underwent a five-minute structured social interaction session with the teacher, while the control group did not. Intersubject correlation analysis was applied to the neural and eye movement data. Learners with pre-lecture interaction outperformed their peers in answering complex but not easy questions. We further observed increased teacher-student eye movement synchronization in this group, correlating with better learning outcomes. This group also exhibited greater teacher-student and student-student neural synchrony, particularly in brain regions implicated in social cognition and language, including the right superior/middle temporal gyri and the right inferior/middle frontal gyri. These findings suggest that even brief social interactions before online lectures can positively impact learning by tuning students’ visual attention allocation and enhancing teacher-student neural coupling.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions