Collaborating minds think alike, processing information in similar ways in a shared task

Whether great minds think alike is up for debate, but the collaborating minds of two people working on a shared task process information alike, according to a study published November 25^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Denise Moerel and colleagues from Western Sydney University in Australia.

Humans rely on collaboration for everything from raising food to raising children. But to cooperate successfully, people need to make sure that they are seeing the same things and working within the same rules. We must agree that the red fruits are the ones that are ripe and that we will leave green fruits alone. Behavioral collaboration requires that people think in the same way and follow the same instructions. To better understand people’s cognitive processes during a shared task, the authors of this study collected data from 24 pairs of people. Each pair had to categorize shapes and patterns and got to decide ahead of time how they would do so—sorting by wavy or straight lines, thick or thin ones, contrast or general shape. Then each pair sat back-to-back and worked together to categorize one shape after another, while electroencephalograms recorded their brain activity to find out how well that activity aligned between pairs.

In the first 45-180 milliseconds after a shape appeared, everyone in the study had similar neural activity, a result of looking at the same pattern on the screen. But after 200 milliseconds, as each pair worked to sort the pattern according to their own rules, activity lined up only in pairs that were actively working together. The brains of each pair were processing information in similar ways, and the alignment of their activity increased over the course of the experiment as the pairs got better at working as a team, following the rules they’d laid out together. The results show that when people agree upon rules and work together, their brains process information in similar ways. The authors suggest this shared activity could have important implications for how groups make decisions and develop traditions and rituals.

The authors add, “As two people learn to work together, their brains start to represent information in a more similar way, showing that collaboration influences how we see and understand the world.”

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: https://plos.io/4hBhuPy

Citation: Moerel D, Grootswagers T, Quek GL, Smit S, Varlet M (2025) Collaborative rule learning promotes interbrain information alignment. PLoS Biol 23(11): e3003479. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003479

Author countries: Australia

Funding: This work was supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC, www.arc.gov.au) Discovery Project awarded to M.V. (DP220103047) and an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award awarded to T.G. (DE230100380). D.M. received salary from DP220103047 and T.G. received salary from DE230100380. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.