Study shows face-to-face talk produces "richer" brain activity than Zoom chats

New Delhi: Researchers have shown that brain activity during online interactions—like those conducted via Zoom—is significantly decreased when compared to brain activity during in-person conversations.

According to Yale University researchers, our brains are adapted to handle dynamic facial cues, which are a major source of social information during in-person interactions.

"In this study, we find that the social systems of the human brain are more active during real live in-person encounters than on Zoom, which appears to be an impoverished social communication system relative to in-person conditions," said Joy Hirsch, professor of comparative medicine and neuroscience, and senior author of the study published in the journal Imaging Neuroscience.

For the study, Hirsch's team recorded the brain's responses, or neural response signals, in individuals engaged in live, two-person interactions, and in those involved in two-person conversations on Zoom, the popular video conference platform.

The researchers found that the strength of neural signalling was "dramatically" reduced on Zoom compared to in-person conversations.

The increased brain activity among those engaged in face-to-face interactions was associated with increased gaze time and pupil diameters, all of which indicate increased arousal in the two brains. It was also characteristic of enhanced face processing ability, the researchers said.

Further, more coordinated neural activity was seen between the brains of individuals conversing in person, which, the researchers said, suggested enhanced reciprocal exchanges of social cues between the interacting partners.

"Overall, the dynamic and natural social interactions that occur spontaneously during in-person interactions appear to be less apparent or absent during Zoom encounters," said Hirsch.

"This is a really robust effect," said Hirsch, whose lab developed a suite of neuroimaging technologies allowing the research team to study interactions between two people in natural settings in real time.

The study findings illustrate how important live, face-to-face interactions are to our natural social behaviours, Hirsch said.

"Online representations of faces, at least with current technology, do not have the same 'privileged access' to social neural circuitry in the brain that is typical of the real thing," she said.

With PTI inputs