California [US], November 29 : When two people work on a shared task, they process information alike, a new study revealed.
Humans rely on collaboration for everything from raising food to raising children. But to cooperate successfully, people need to ensure they are seeing the same things and working within the same rules. We must agree that the red fruits are the ones that are ripe and that we will leave the green fruits alone.
The study, published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, was led by Denise Moerel and colleagues from Western Sydney University in Australia.
Behavioural collaboration requires people to think and act the same way and to follow the same instructions. To better understand people's cognitive processes during a shared task, the authors collected data from 24 pairs.
Each pair had to categorise shapes and patterns and got to decide ahead of time how they would do so, sorting by wavy or straight lines, thick or thin ones, contrast or general shape. Then each pair sat back-to-back and worked together to categorise one shape after another, while electroencephalograms recorded their brain activity to find out how well that activity aligned between pairs.
Within the first 45-180 milliseconds after a shape appeared, everyone in the study showed similar neural activity, a result of viewing the same pattern on the screen. But after 200 milliseconds, as each pair worked to sort the pattern according to their own rules, activity lined up only in pairs that were actively working together.
The brains of each pair were processing information in similar ways, and the alignment of their activity increased over the course of the experiment as the pairs got better at working as a team, following the rules they'd laid out together.
The results show that when people agree upon rules and work together, their brains process information in similar ways. The authors suggest this shared activity could have important implications for how groups make decisions and develop traditions and rituals.
The authors added, "As two people learn to work together, their brains start to represent information in a more similar way, showing that collaboration influences how we see and understand the world."
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