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Title: Dyadic Interaction Platform: A novel tool to study transparent social interactions

Abstract: Research on social cognition examines how people perceive, interpret, and respond to others and social situations. Many real-life social interactions occur during direct face-to-face contact and depend on immediate, continuous feedback about mutual behavior and environmental changes. However, experimental laboratory settings for dyadic interactions often lack these essential naturalistic conditions. Here, we describe a novel experimental setting, the Dyadic Interaction Platform (DIP), designed to investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms of real-time social interactions. The DIP features a transparent screen that allows two participants to view visual stimuli and each other simultaneously, facilitating face-to-face interaction in a shared vertical workspace. Various versions of the DIP facilitate interactions between two human adults, adults and children, two children, nonhuman primates, and mixed nonhuman-human dyads. The platforms allow for diverse manipulations of interactive contexts and synchronized recordings of both participants’ behavioral, physiological, and neural measures. Thus, the DIP offers a unique balance: the rigorous control of a laboratory in an intuitive, socially salient setting. We demonstrate how this platform integrates economic game theory with sensorimotor processing across a variety of tasks, such as value-based strategic coordination, dyadic foraging, and social learning.