Can You Feel My Exclusion? When Two Bodies Take Part in the Same Event

A six-month-old infant is sitting on their caregiver’s lap. In front of them, two people are playing with a ball. At some point, the ball reaches the dyad. There is exchange, participation, expectation. Then something changes: the two people continue playing, but they stop passing the ball to the infant and caregiver.

For an adult, we might call this social exclusion. But what does such an event mean to an organism that does not yet possess the words “inclusion,” “rejection,” or “ostracism”?

And there is an even more interesting question: when this experience happens in the presence of a caregiver, does it happen only within the infant?

This is the difficult territory explored by Niloofar Goharbakhsh and Louisa Kulke in a particularly elegant investigation. Published in 2026 in Developmental Science, their study, Can You Feel My Pain? Neural-Behavioural Changes in Caregiver–Infant Dyads During Ostracism, simultaneously investigated neural and behavioural responses in infants and caregivers during experiences of social inclusion and exclusion.

More than the findings themselves, the question chosen by the authors deserves attention.

A question that requires two bodies

A large part of experimental neuroscience has been built by placing an individual in front of a stimulus and asking what happens inside that person's brain.

Goharbakhsh and Kulke begin somewhere else.

If an infant undergoes a potentially adverse social situation while accompanied by a caregiver, perhaps recording only what happens in the infant is not enough. The caregiver observes, reacts, regulates their own behaviour, looks toward the infant, and may participate in the way that event is traversed.

The researchers used EEG hyperscanning, a technique that allows simultaneous electroencephalographic recording from two people. The study was preregistered, including its hypotheses, methods and analyses — an important methodological decision that increases transparency between what was predicted before data collection and what later emerged from the data.

The study initially involved 45 healthy infants, approximately five to eight months old, accompanied by their caregivers. After exclusions based on experimental criteria and recording quality, 41 dyads contributed to behavioural and affective analyses, 34 infants remained in the theta-power analysis, and 34 dyads contributed to the inter-brain synchrony analyses.

Choosing infants this young makes the question even more interesting. We are observing a developmental period that precedes many of the sophisticated sociocognitive abilities later used to interpret rejection consciously.

The elegance lies in the experimental design

Infant and caregiver jointly participated in a ball-tossing game involving two experimenters.

First came inclusion: everyone had opportunities to participate.

Then came exclusion: the two experimenters began throwing the ball only to each other, ignoring the caregiver–infant dyad.

Finally, there was re-inclusion, when the infant and caregiver were allowed to participate again.

But one methodological detail is especially intelligent.

The authors did not simply compare “receiving the ball” with “being excluded.” During the inclusion phase itself, there were moments in which the experimenters passed the ball to one another — situations in which it simply was not the dyad's turn. These events shared perceptual characteristics with exclusion and did not require movement from the infant or caregiver.

This made it possible to compare:

“It is not my turn” versus “I am being excluded.”

The ball continues to move between the same people.

Visually, much of the scene remains similar.

What changes is the relationship of the dyad to the event.

This subtlety deserves recognition. A strong experiment does not depend only on sophisticated equipment. It depends on constructing a situation in which a conceptually important difference becomes experimentally interrogable.

The infant detects a difference

In the infants, theta power was significantly higher during exclusion events than during the equivalent “not-my-turn” events. This effect was observed in the sample of 34 infants included in that analysis. In caregivers, however, the same theta difference did not appear.

Behaviourally, both infants and caregivers also responded to the situation. Infants displayed greater negative emotionality during exclusion, together with indications of increased attention-seeking behaviour. The authors interpret the combined findings as evidence that very young infants already show sensitivity to cues of ostracism.

This finding speaks to a growing literature that has progressively moved earlier our understanding of infant sensitivity to exclusion. Previous studies had already shown behavioural responses to ostracism in infancy, while subsequent research explored changes in neural processing after exclusion experiences.

Goharbakhsh and Kulke add something particularly important: infant and caregiver were measured together while the event was taking place.

Then came perhaps the most interesting result: they did not simply become “more synchronized”

An intuitively attractive hypothesis would be that a shared emotional experience should increase synchrony between two brains.

That hypothesis was not confirmed.

Inter-brain synchrony, measured using phase-locking value, was not globally higher during exclusion, nor was it consistently greater than in control conditions or artificially permuted dyads.

This result makes the study even more valuable.

It prevents an increasingly common simplification in hyperscanning research:

more synchrony = better relationship.

The data do not support such a simple equation.

Recent research has already indicated that caregiver–child relationships and neural synchrony depend on specific characteristics of the interaction, context, relational history and moment-to-moment dynamics. Naturalistic hyperscanning studies likewise suggest that shared behavioural signals do not necessarily result in increased inter-brain synchrony.

Goharbakhsh and Kulke therefore open the door to something more interesting: interaction may depend on flexible modulation between states of greater and lesser synchrony.

The question changes.

Perhaps two well-regulated organisms do not need to do the same thing at the same time.

Sometimes, precisely in order to help an infant move through a particular state, the caregiver may need not to reproduce that state completely.

Regulation does not mean copying

Imagine an infant becoming progressively uncomfortable.

If the caregiver merely reproduced every emotional alteration in the child, the relationship could act as an amplifier. Regulation may require a different configuration: detecting the other's state without necessarily adopting exactly the same dynamic.

The authors themselves raise the possibility that caregivers modulate their own states in ways that contribute to the infant's emotional regulation. This may help explain why behavioural alignment was observed without a corresponding general increase in neural synchrony.

It is precisely here that the study begins to speak to our own conceptual framework.

Not because it demonstrates 5D Consciousness or the concept of Body-Territory. It was not designed to test either of them.

Rather, its findings make insufficient an extremely simple interpretation in which each brain is understood in isolation and the relationship is added afterward as another external variable.

Body-Territory: the event does not end at the skin

Within our Body-Territory proposal, an organism does not first exist as a sealed unit and only afterward receive information from an external environment.

It exists continuously in relation.

Light, temperature, sound, other people, personal history, language, metabolism, body position, interoceptive signals and proprioceptive signals all participate in the material configuration from which that organism can perceive itself as Being.

In this sense, the ball game provides a small but powerful experimental image.

The ball has not changed.

The experimenters are still there.

The infant remains on the caregiver's lap.

The EEG continues recording.

But a relational difference has emerged:

before, the ball could also come to us; now it circulates without us.

This difference begins to participate in the configuration of the Body-Territory.

And here it is important to preserve a distinction central to our proposal of 5D Consciousness: we do not need to claim that attention “created” exclusion or made that stimulus begin to exist. The event may already be materially processed and may already be participating in the configuration of the organism before any possibility of conceptual elaboration or conscious verbal report.

The infant does not need to formulate:

“They are excluding me.”

The Body may already detect that something in the regularity of the relationship has changed.

Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful lessons of the study.

Synchrony may not be a place — but a movement

When we imagine two synchronized brains, it is easy to fall into the image of two machines entering the same frequency.

But organisms are not metronomes.

Caregiver–infant interaction is movement: approaching, withdrawing, anticipating, responding, stabilizing, surprising, regulating and allowing change to become possible again.

Recent studies of parent–child interaction using EEG and fNIRS have increasingly moved toward naturalistic situations, in which synchrony is no longer treated as a permanent property of the dyad but rather as something that varies in relation to the events passing through the interaction.

This approaches something central to our understanding of 5D Consciousness:

Being does not need to mean remaining in the same state.

There can be enough stability for us to recognize continuity and enough movement for a new configuration to emerge.

Perhaps a healthy caregiver–infant relationship has precisely this quality: not to remain synchronized all the time, but to be able to change configuration when the event requires it.

The merit is also in what did not appear

There is science when a hypothesis is confirmed.

But equally important science happens when a sufficiently careful experimental design reveals that our hypothesis was too simple.

Goharbakhsh and Kulke could have found “greater synchrony during exclusion” and produced an easy narrative.

They found something more valuable.

The infant showed a differentiated neural response.

Infant and caregiver responded behaviourally.

Yet the two brains did not simply increase their synchrony.

The relationship appears to be more dynamic than that.

This result prevents us from turning hyperscanning into a new form of relational phrenology, in which we search for a number and declare: “Here is the connection between two people.”

Instead, it forces us to keep asking.

And perhaps this is the greatest compliment we can offer the authors: they constructed an experiment in which the answer they found expands the original question.

If an infant without language can detect a change in the social relationship; if the caregiver participates behaviourally in that event without simply reproducing the same neural dynamics; and if synchrony can increase or decrease according to contextual demands, perhaps the most interesting question is no longer:

“Are two brains synchronized?”

but rather:

What configuration allows two Body-Territories to move through the same event together without needing to become identical?

Perhaps feeling the other does not mean copying the other.

Perhaps caring means precisely being able to remain in relation while producing the difference required for a new state to become possible.

References

Goharbakhsh, N., & Kulke, L. (2026). Can You Feel My Pain? Neural-Behavioural Changes in Caregiver–Infant Dyads During Ostracism. Developmental Science, 29(5), e70269. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.70269

Liu, S., Han, Z. R., Xu, J., et al. (2024). Parenting Links to Parent–Child Interbrain Synchrony: A Real-Time fNIRS Hyperscanning Study. Cerebral Cortex, 34(2), bhad533. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhad533

Marriott Haresign, I., Phillips, E. A. M., Whitehorn, M., et al. (2023). Gaze Onsets During Naturalistic Infant-Caregiver Interaction Associate With “Sender” but Not “Receiver” Neural Responses, and Do Not Lead to Changes in Inter-Brain Synchrony. Scientific Reports, 13, 3555. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28988-0

Quadrelli, E., Mermier, J., Basset, G., Bulf, H., & Turati, C. (2025). Infants' Neural Processing of Emotional Faces After Ostracism. Scientific Reports, 15, 28414. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-11310-5

Quadrelli, E., Mermier, J., Nazzari, S., Bulf, H., & Turati, C. (2023). You Can't Play With Us: First-Person Ostracism Affects Infants' Behavioral Reactivity. Child Development, 94(6). https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13969

Somers, J. A., Luecken, L. J., McNeish, D., Lemery-Chalfant, K., & Spinrad, T. L. (2022). Second-by-Second Infant and Mother Emotion Regulation and Coregulation Processes. Development and Psychopathology, 34(5), 1887–1900. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579421000389

Turk, E., Endevelt-Shapira, Y., Feldman, R., Van Den Heuvel, M. I., & Levy, J. (2022). Brains in Sync: Practical Guideline for Parent–Infant EEG During Natural Interaction. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 833112. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.833112