Physiological synchrony in EEG, electrodermal activity and heart rate for the assessment of shared attention
conference paper
Physiological measures such as brain potentials as measured through electroencephalography (EEG), skin conductance or electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate can be informative of individuals’ attentional engagement. We are interested in exploiting such measures in real life situations. A challenge of interpreting physiological signals as markers of attention in real life, is the lack of context information. When studying groups of individuals, a suitable approach may be to determine physiological synchrony (PS) – the degree to which physiological measures of multiple people uniformly change. We explored to potential of PS as measure of attentional engagement. We here determined PS in EEG, EDA and heart rate of participants that where selectively attentinding to the narrative of an audiobook, or to short auditory stimuli that were interspersed. We found that PS increased upon presentation of emotionally or cognitively relevant short stimuli, so that it may be used for detection of relevant events in cases where timing is unknown. Using the synchrony of a participant’s EEG, EDA or heart rate with the two groups attending to the narrative or short-stimuli as a predictor of attentional instruction allowed for the correct identification in 96%, 73% and 73% of the cases, respectively. PS may thus be of value when interested in monitoring attentional engagement. As PS does not dependent on event markers, this approach is well-suited for real-life settings.
TNO Identifier
952978
ISBN
10.6084/m9.figshare.13013717
Source title
Proceedings of the joint meeting of the 12th International Conference on Measuring Behavior and the 6th Seminar on Behavioral Methods to be held in Krakow, Poland, October 15-18, 2021
Editor(s)
Spink, A.
Barski, J.
Brouwer, A.M.
Riedel, G.
Sil, A.
Barski, J.
Brouwer, A.M.
Riedel, G.
Sil, A.
Place of publication
Wageningen
Pages
12-17
Files
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