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Cooperative Behavior Evokes Interbrain Synchrony in the Prefrontal and Temporoparietal Cortex: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of fNIRS Hyperscanning Studies.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
55 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Reviewing digital collaborative interactions with multimodal hyperscanning through an ever-growing database.Frontiers in neuroergonomics · 2026Pooled it
- Interpersonal neural synchrony and mental disorders: unlocking potential pathways for clinical interventions.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Pooled it
- Can dyadic rope-skipping enhance cooperative behavior in female university students with depressive symptoms? Evidence from behavioral and fNIRS hyperscanning data.BMC psychiatry · 2026Trial
- Hyperbaric oxygen intervention enhances cooperative gains in high-trust people at high altitude: the role of medial prefrontal interbrain synchrony.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Trial
- Acute Stress Impacts Executive-Social Function: Evidence From Prefrontal Activation and fNIRS-Based Hyperscanning.Brain and behavior · 2026Trial
- You Are Always on My Mind: Neural Synchrony Between Mothers and Their 2-Year-Olds During Collaborative Play.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Inter-brain coupling during naturalistic collaborative Tangram solving in child dyads: an exploratory fNIRS hyperscanning study.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- Parental speech and gesture scaffolding moderate the neural dynamics of parent-child synchrony.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Social interactions between people of same and different generations shape longitudinal changes in interpersonal neural synchrony, loneliness, and social connection.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Synchronizing brains and hearts: A practical guide for caregiver-child fNIRS-ECG multimodal hyperscanning.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- fNIRS Hyperscanning of Negotiation: The Role of Personality and Neural Synchronization.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Addressing arbitrary choices of frequency band of interest in fNIRS hyperscanning.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Social attachment shapes interbrain synchrony.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Listening to a Consonant Chord Progression during Live Face-to-Face Gaze Enhances Neural Activity in Social Systems.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Inter-Brain Neural Couplings During Table Tennis Doubles.PsyCh journal · 2026Article
- Shaping inter-brain plasticity: A feasibility study of enhancing inter-brain synchrony with dyadic neurofeedback.iScience · 2026Article
- Investigating interbrain synchrony under teamwork disruption: an fNIRS hyperscanning study.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2026Article
- Integrating neural, physiological, and interoceptive measures in social interaction.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- When robots reshape teams: neurodynamic insights into taskwork and teamwork in search and rescue.Frontiers in neuroergonomics · 2026Article
- How to design real-world functional near-infrared spectroscopy studies: a primer.Neurophotonics · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Single-brain neuroimaging studies have shown that human cooperation is associated with neural activity in frontal and temporoparietal regions. However, it remains unclear whether single-brain studies are informative about cooperation in real life, where people interact dynamically. Such dynamic interactions have become the focus of interbrain studies. An advantageous technique in this regard is functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) because it is less susceptible to movement artifacts than more conventional techniques like electroencephalography (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We conducted a systematic review and the first quantitative meta-analysis of fNIRS hyperscanning of cooperation, based on thirteen studies with 890 human participants. Overall, the meta-analysis revealed evidence of statistically significant interbrain synchrony while people were cooperating, with large overall effect sizes in both frontal and temporoparietal areas. All thirteen studies observed significant interbrain synchrony in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), suggesting that this region is particularly relevant for cooperative behavior. The consistency in these findings is unlikely to be because of task-related activations, given that the relevant studies used diverse cooperation tasks. Together, the present findings support the importance of interbrain synchronization of frontal and temporoparietal regions in interpersonal cooperation. Moreover, the present article highlights the usefulness of meta-analyses as a tool for discerning patterns in interbrain dynamics.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.