A Practical Guide to EEG Hyperscanning in Joint Action Research: From Motivation to Implementation

Developments in cognitive neuroscience have led to the emergence of hyperscanning, the simultaneous measurement of brain activity from multiple people. Hyperscanning holds promise for the study of social cognition, including joint action, because of its potential to capture neural processes that occur within and between people as they coordinate actions toward a shared goal. Skeptical voices have, however, questioned the utility of hyperscanning based on concerns regarding interpretability of inter-brain measures and lack of a unifying theoretical approach. Here, we provide a practical guide for researchers considering using hyperscanning to study joint action and seeking to mitigate these concerns. We focus specifically on EEG hyperscanning, which is widely available and optimally suited for capturing fine-grained temporal dynamics of action coordination. Our guidelines cover questions that are likely to arise when planning a hyperscanning project, ranging from whether hyperscanning is appropriate for answering one’s research questions to considerations for study design, dependent variable selection, data analysis, and visualization. Our perspective is that benefits of hyperscanning can be maximized, and interpretability issues mitigated, if joint action researchers follow clear guidelines – including those provided here – to carefully consider the theoretical implications of their research design choices and other methodological decisions.