title: Cerebral coherence between communicators marks the emergence of meaning.
abstract: How can we understand each other during communicative interactions? An influential suggestion holds that communicators are primed by each other's behaviors, with associative mechanisms automatically coordinating the production of communicative signals and the comprehension of their meanings. An alternative suggestion posits that mutual understanding requires shared conceptualizations of a signal's use, i.e., "conceptual pacts" that are abstracted away from specific experiences. Both accounts predict coherent neural dynamics across communicators, aligned either to the occurrence of a signal or to the dynamics of conceptual pacts. Using coherence spectral-density analysis of cerebral activity simultaneously measured in pairs of communicators, this study shows that establishing mutual understanding of novel signals synchronizes cerebral dynamics across communicators' right temporal lobes. This interpersonal cerebral coherence occurred only within pairs with a shared communicative history, and at temporal scales independent from signals' occurrences. These findings favor the notion that meaning emerges from shared conceptualizations of a signal's use.
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands; a.stolk@donders.ru.nl.
authors.forename: Arjen
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Stolk
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Psychology and Ergonomics, University of Twente, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands;
authors.forename: Matthijs L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Noordzij
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, OX1 3UD Oxford, United Kingdom;
authors.forename: Lennart
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Verhagen
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands; and.
authors.forename: Inge
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Volman
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jan-Mathijs
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Schoffelen
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands;
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Oostenveld
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hagoort
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands;
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Toni
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001519:Behavior; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: conceptual knowledge; dual functional magnetic resonance imaging; experimental semiotics; social interaction; theory of mind