The Basal Ganglia Coupling During Social Interaction Revealed by Dyadic FMRI

Ray Lee¹

Taking advantage of emerging dyadic fMRI (dfMRI), a study on two human-brain interactions inside one MRI scanner was conducted. Besides confirmed most of the previous results regarding BOLD effect in social cognition, the probabilistic independent component analysis (PICA) results of our dfMRI data reveal that the basal ganglia coupling between two brains could be an essential stage in social cognition. This is the first time that fMRI shows that a special region of brain during social interaction becomes correlated, while most other BOLD effects due to social interaction are only coherent within each individual brain.