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Abstract

Recent research has shown that interpersonal synchrony is accompanied by interbrain synchrony as shown by a substantial body of research (eg. Tognoli et al. 2007, Dumas et al. 2010). However, it remains unclear if interbrain synchrony stems from neural entrainment to shared sensorimotor input or is caused by the similarity of endogenous processes that enhance subsequent interpersonal coordination. Recent studies addressed this question, by investigating interbrain synchrony during action planning, that is without sensorimotor input (Mu et al. 2016, Novembre et al. 2017). Both studies showed that neural synchrony prior to a joint action onset in the alpha (Mu et al. 2016) or beta band (Novembre et al. 2017) was associated with better behavioural synchrony. The present dual-EEG study extends this line of research to a natural interaction, which is joint music making and the temporal precision of joint entries. It explores interbrain synchrony in all five frequency bands reported in the dual-EEG literature on interpersonal coordination, i.e., delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma (Lindenberger et al. 2009, Müller et al. 2013) and their role in predicting future behavioural coordination. The current study investigated if interbrain synchrony during joint action planning predicts the synchrony of the subsequent action onset.