Live vs video interaction: sensorimotor and visual cortical oscillations during action observation.

Increasingly, in the field of communication, education, and business, people are switching to video interaction, and interlocutors frequently complain that the perception of nonverbal information and concentration suffer. We investigated this issue by analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) oscillations of the sensorimotor (mu rhythm) and visual (alpha rhythm) cortex of the brain in an experiment with action observation live and on video. The mu rhythm reflects the activity of the mirror neuron system, and the occipital alpha rhythm shows the level of visual attention. We used 32-channel EEG recorded during live and video action observation in 83 healthy volunteers. The ICA method was used for selecting the mu- and alpha-components; the Fourier Transform was used to calculate the suppression index relative to the baseline (stationary demonstrator) of the rhythms. The main range of the mu rhythm was indeed sensitive to social movement and was highly dependent on the conditions of interaction-live or video. The upper mu-range appeared to be less sensitive to the conditions, but more sensitive to different movements. The alpha rhythm did not depend on the type of movement; however, a live performance initially caused a stronger concentration of visual attention. Thus, subtle social and nonverbal perceptions may suffer in remote video interactions.

The degree of mu rhythm suppression in women is associated with presence of children as well as empathy and anxiety level.

In experiments on observing and performing social gestures, the level of mu rhythm suppression is associated with the activity of the mirror neuron system (MNS), which is responsible for the perception and understanding of nonverbal signals in social communication. In turn, while MNS activity may be associated primarily with empathy, it is also associated with other psychological and demographic factors affecting the effectiveness of cortical neural networks. In this study, we verified the influence of empathy, state and trait anxiety levels, presence and number of children, and age on the mu-suppression level in 40 women. We used 32-channel EEG recorded during observation, and synchronous execution of various hand movements. The ICA infomax method was used for decomposing and selecting the left hemisphere component of the mu-rhythm. Mu-suppression was higher in women with one child, with higher levels of empathy, and with lower anxiety levels. It is possible that MNS activity is stronger in women during parental care.