Symbiotic Devices Workshop: The practice of EEG hyperscanning

Social cognitive neuroscience has traditionally focused on studying individual brains in isolation. However, understanding social cognition requires examining brains in real-time interaction. Many of the most compelling research questions in this field can only be addressed by observing multiple people engaging and responding to each other simultaneously.

Dr. Denise Moerel employs EEG hyperscanning combined with multivariate approaches to investigate how neural representations align or diverge during cooperative and competitive exchanges. Dr Denise Moerel will introduce the hyperscanning approach and present some of her recent work illustrating how multiple interacting brains dynamically represent information and coordinate behaviour.

The session will then turn to the technical challenges of collecting EEG data from multiple participants at once, and demonstrate practical strategies for overcoming them. Participants will learn about the use of the Lab Streaming Layer (LSL) for streaming, recording, and synchronizing multiple data streams. The workshop will include a detailed, hands-on walkthrough of setting up and using LSL, featuring a live, real-time hyperscanning demonstration and a series of LSL programming challenges for those interested in exploring the system’s capabilities further.