Interpersonal Neural Entrainment during Early Social Interaction

Currently, we understand much about how children's brains attend to and learn from information presented while they are alone, viewing a screen - but less about how interpersonal social influences are substantiated in the brain. Here, we consider research that examines how social behaviors affect not one, but both partners in a dyad. We review studies that measured interpersonal neural entrainment during early social interaction, considering two ways of measuring entrainment: concurrent entrainment (e.g., 'when A is high, B is high' - also known as synchrony) and sequential entrainment ('changes in A forward-predict changes in B'). We discuss possible causes of interpersonal neural entrainment, and consider whether it is merely an epiphenomenon, or whether it plays an independent, mechanistic role in early attention and learning.