Collaborative rule learning promotes interbrain information alignment

Social interactions shape our perception of the world, influencing how we interpret incoming information. Alignment between interacting individuals’ sensory and cognitive processes is key to successful cooperation and communication, but the neural processes underlying this alignment remain unknown. Here, we leveraged Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) on electroencephalography (EEG) hyperscanning data to investigate information alignment in 24 pairs of participants who performed a categorization task together based on agreed-upon rules. Significant interbrain information alignment emerged within 45 ms of stimulus presentation and persisted for hundreds of milliseconds. Early alignment (45-180 ms) occurred in both real and randomly matched pseudo-pairs, reflecting shared sensory responses. Importantly, alignment after 200 ms strengthened with practice and was unique to real pairs, driven by shared representations associated with, and extending beyond, the categorization rules they formed. Together, these findings highlight distinct processes underpinning interbrain information alignment during social interactions, that can be effectively captured and disentangled with Interbrain RSA.