EEG frequency tagging reveals neural entrainment to people moving in synchrony

Abstract

Humans and other animals have evolved to act in groups, but how does the brain distinguish multiple people moving in group from multiple people moving independently? Across three experiments, we test whether biological motion perception depends on the spatiotemporal relationships among people moving together. In Experiment 1, we apply EEG frequency tagging to apparent biological motion and show that fluently ordered sequences of body postures drive brain activity at three hierarchical levels of biological motion processing: image, body sequence, and movement. We then show that movement-, but not body- or image-related brain responses are enhanced when observing four agents moving in synchrony. Neural entrainment was strongest for fluently moving synchronous groups (Experiment 2), displayed in upright orientation (Experiment 3). Our findings show that the brain preferentially entrains to the collective movement of human agents, deploying perceptual organization principles of synchrony and common fate for the purpose of social perception.