The interplay of neural networks enabling social interaction

The quality and number of social interactions are among the best predictors of long-term health. So how do good social interactions arise?

Social neuroscience has focused on a number of affective and cognitive functions as potential “building blocks” of social interaction.

However, utilizing mainly simplistic and passive paradigms, we still fail at describing how actual, live social interactions emerge – and why they so often go awry, especially in people with mental disorders. Here, the concept of “building blocks” may have become an impediment to progress.

Recent evidence suggests that in more complex experimental tasks, socio-affective and -cognitive processes are not simply stacked up, but are dynamically working together, just as the underlying neural networks seem to engage in lively interplay.

INTERACT’s main objective is to understand how adaptive social interactions emerge, based on elucidating the interactions of networks and processes. INTERACT will take a major leap forward with a systematic and mechanistic, yet fully socially-interactive approach.

Across six work packages, INTERACT will move from the comprehensive investigation of behavioral and neural interaction patterns of social affect and cognition in controlled lab settings to completely free social interactions in people’s everyday lives.

Combining a novel experimental approach with dual neuroimaging (hyperscanning) and multisite neurostimulation, neuroeconomics, and multi-agent ecological ambulatory assessment, INTERACT will shift from a modular to a complex systems study of actual social interaction. It also provides steps towards specific and targeted interventions in people with social interaction difficulties.

INTERACT aspires to bridge the gap between basic and applied research, developing an interdisciplinary model of social interactions that expands our knowledge and applies it to real-world settings.