EEG Hyperscanning to Evaluate Team Dynamics and Cooperation Strategies Among Secondary Students

Face-to-face communication remains essential for inter-personal connections even in an increasingly digital world. Understanding the neural mechanisms of group interactions can inform strategies to enhance learning and interpersonal communication. While behavioral and selfreports showed coordination patterns among learners, these methods lack temporal precision with objective measures. This study investigate team dynamic patterns among secondary students through neurophysiological analysis using EEG hyper-scanning. Twenty eight female secondary school students were recruited and organized into seven groups of four participants each. Instead of a separate control group, baseline measures and within-subject task contrasts were employed to isolate the neural and behavioral effects of different social interaction contexts. Each group completed two main tasks: (1) a mixed cooperation-competition task, and (2) a purely collaborative task. We used continuous and simultaneous EEG recordings to evaluate behavioral and group-level task performance. A positive correlation was found between inter-brain coherence in the θ frequency band and team’s task performance (R = 0.73, p < 0.01). This implied the neural synchrony was associated with better collaborative outcomes. Increased frontal band-power energy was significantly associated with higher team connectivity ratings (β = 0.63, p < 0.05), suggesting that effective team interactions resulted in enhanced frontal neural activity. However, complex relationships emerged between mental states and group performance; mental attention not always conducive to task performance but also requiring adaptability. Our findings contribute to the evidence-based understanding of interpersonal communication for improving team-based interactions in educational contexts.