Johanna Sänger

Max Planck Institute for Human Development | MPIB

When playing music in an ensemble, musicians need to precisely coordinate their actions with one another. As shown in our previous studies on guitar duets, interbrain synchronization plays an essential role during such interactions. In this study, we simultaneously recorded electroencephalograms from four guitarists during quartet playing, to explo...

Humans interact with the environment through sensory and motor acts. Some of these interactions require synchronization among two or more individuals. Multiple-trial designs, which we have used in past work to study interbrain synchronization in the course of joint action, constrain the range of observable interactions. To overcome the limitations...

To investigate whether directionality in hyperbrain networks reflects different roles during interpersonal action coordination (IAC), we recorded EEG data from pairs of guitarists playing together as musical leaders versus followers. We used an asymmetric index of in-phase synchronization to analyze hyperbrain networks of directed functional connec...

To further test and explore the hypothesis that synchronous oscillatory brain activity supports interpersonally coordinated behavior during dyadic music performance, we simultaneously recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) from the brains of each of 12 guitar duets repeatedly playing a modified Rondo in two voices by C.G. Scheidler. Indicators of...

To reveal the neural and behavioral dynamics of social interaction, single-person studies are increasingly complemented by research designs that simultaneously assess two or more interacting individuals. In this article, we review studies on neural mechanisms and markers of social interactions that use multi-person functional magnetic resonance ima...