A computational and multi-brain signature for aberrant social coordination in schizophrenia.

Social functioning impairment is a core symptom of schizophrenia (SCZ). Yet, the computational and neural mechanisms of social coordination in SCZ under real-time and naturalistic settings are poorly understood. Here, we instructed patients with SCZ to coordinate with a healthy control (HC) in a joint finger-tapping task, during which their brain activity was measured by functional near-infrared spectroscopy simultaneously. The results showed that patients with SCZ exhibited poor rhythm control ability and unstable tapping behaviour, which weakened their interpersonal synchronization when coordinating with HCs. Moreover, the dynamical systems modeling revealed disrupted between-participant coupling when SCZ patients coordinated with HCs. Importantly, increased inter-brain synchronization was identified within SCZ-HC dyads, which positively correlated with behavioural synchronization and successfully predicted dimensions of psychopathology. Our study suggests that SCZ individuals may require stronger interpersonal neural alignment to support their deficient coordination performance. This hyperalignment may be relevant for developing inter-personalized treatment strategies.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no competing interests. The study received approval from the ethics committee of Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences at Zhejiang University (No. 2022068) and adhered to the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants were informed about the research objectives and provided written consent. Participants were paid for their participation.
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