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Abstract Concepts in Social Interaction: A Hyperscanning EEG Study
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Daria Goriachun1, Kristof Strijkers1, Anna M. Borghi2; 1Aix-Marseille University, 2Sapienza University of Rome
Our everyday conversations rely heavily on abstract concepts. When we talk about love, achievements, or friendships, we refer to ideas that have no clear physical form, we cannot see or touch them, yet we easily understand them. How do we learn such concepts? Social interaction may play a key role: people discuss, negotiate, and adjust their perspectives to build common meanings for abstract ideas. However, direct behavioural and neural evidence showing how interaction shapes the learning and representation of abstract concepts remains limited. The present study investigates whether engaging in social interaction during concept learning influences the grounding and subsequent processing of abstract concepts. Participants will engage in a concept teaching task in which they explain the meanings of abstract and concrete concepts. In the interactive condition, participants will work in dyads and explain concepts to each other. In the individual condition, participants will complete a comparable task alone by producing definitions without social interaction. Before and after the concept teaching task, participants will complete two semantic tasks while EEG is recorded. We will compare ERPs between pre- and post-training phases and across interactive and individual learning conditions. Beyond establishing whether social interaction modulates abstract concept learning, the study also investigates how such effects may arise. In particular, it examines the role of alignment in this process. During the interactive learning phase, behavioural and physiological data will be recorded from both participants, including audio and video recordings, eye-tracking, heart rate, pulse, and electrodermal activity. These measures will allow fine-grained analyses of verbal and non-verbal alignment between interlocutors. In addition, EEG will be recorded simultaneously from both participants (hyperscanning) to assess inter-brain synchronisation (IBS) as a neural marker of alignment. The study is currently in progress. Pilot data collection and analysis are underway to evaluate the feasibility of the hyperscanning setup and the sensitivity of the paradigm to differences between learning conditions. Preliminary observations suggest that participants engage differently with abstract concepts in the interactive compared to the individual condition, although no conclusions can yet be drawn. Several outcomes are possible. If social interaction enhances the grounding of abstract concepts, we expect improved behavioural performance and modulated ERP responses for abstract concepts learned in the interactive condition relative to the individual condition. Greater interpersonal alignment during learning may also predict stronger subsequent semantic processing effects. Alternatively, if no differences emerge between learning conditions, this may suggest that social grounding operates primarily through long-term linguistic experience rather than immediate interaction. By combining behavioural, electrophysiological, and hyperscanning approaches, this project aims to clarify how social interaction contributes to the grounding of abstract concepts and to identify potential neural mechanisms supporting socially mediated conceptual learning.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics