Towards Multi-Brain Decoding in Autism: A Self-Supervised Learning Approach

This study introduces a self-supervised learning (SSL) approach to hyperscanning electroencephalography (EEG) data, targeting the identification of autism spectrum condition (ASC) during social interactions. Hyperscanning enables simultaneous recording of neural activity across interacting individuals, offering a novel path for studying brain-to-brain synchrony in ASC. Leveraging an unlabeled, large-scale single-brain EEG dataset for SSL pretraining, we developed a multi-brain classification model fine-tuned with hyperscanning data from dyadic interactions involving ASC and neurotypical participants. The SSL model demonstrated superior performance (78.13% accuracy and 98.90% recall) compared to supervised baselines and logistic regression using spectral EEG biomarkers. These results underscore the efficacy of SSL in addressing the challenges of limited labeled data, enhancing EEG-based diagnostic tools for ASC, and advancing research in social neuroscience.