# Neural Basis of Inter-brain Synchrony during Social Interaction in Health and Disease

> **NIH NIH F31** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES · 2023 · $41,294

## Abstract

Abstract
Social interaction is an evolutionarily conserved toolkit, critical to the survival and development of a wide variety
of species. Impaired social interaction is one of the key symptoms across many neuropsychiatric disorders,
including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia. Therefore, elucidating the underlying neural
circuits and computations of social behaviors is essential to understand the causes and mechanisms of many
neurological disorders with a strong translational implication. Social interaction is dynamical in nature as it often
involves a constant feedback loop of actions and reactions of all participating individuals. However, current
approaches in social neuroscience often overlook this property and mostly focus on the underlying neural
processes within a single individual. To fully understand how the social brain functions in health and disease, it
is critical to examine the integrated system of all social participants and the neural properties that emerge from
it. One of such emergent features is inter-brain synchrony. In recent years, substantial effort has been dedicated
to investigating how neural dynamics across individuals are coordinated during social interaction. Using non-
invasive recording techniques, many human studies have demonstrated that inter-brain synchrony emerges
across social participants in various social contexts. In fact, it has also been shown that inter-brain synchrony is
altered in individuals with social deficits caused by psychiatric illnesses. Despite such remarkable findings,
technical constraints limit the extent of investigation and leave open various questions: how inter-brain synchrony
emerges from cellular-level circuit components, and how these dynamics are related to computational processes
that support healthy or impaired social interaction? Integrating a novel machine-learning approach with state-of-
the-art in vivo calcium imaging in freely interacting mice, the proposed experiments will address how inter-brain
synchrony (inter-brain neural correlation) arises in different genetically-defined neuronal populations in the
medial prefrontal cortex (Aim 1). This work will also characterize the potential alteration of inter-brain synchrony
and its behavioral implications in Shank3 mutant mice – an established ASD mouse model (Aim 2). The insights
derived from this research will expand our understanding of how the information shared across multiple
interacting brains can shape on-going social interaction, shedding new light onto how inter-brain synchrony can
serve as a putative biomarker for impaired social interaction in ASD and laying the groundwork for new
approaches to treat psychiatric illnesses.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10751334
- **Project number:** 1F31MH134521-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
- **Principal Investigator:** Nguyen Thanh Phi
- **Activity code:** F31 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2023
- **Award amount:** $41,294
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2023-09-30 → 2026-09-29

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10751334

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10751334, Neural Basis of Inter-brain Synchrony during Social Interaction in Health and Disease (1F31MH134521-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10751334. Licensed CC0.

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