Monitoring audience engagement using electrodermal activity during an inaugural lecture

Is an audience captured by a speech or lecture? At what times especially? Do different groups in an audience experience the same speech in different ways? Insight into attentional engagement of individuals can be valuable but difficult to quantify using self-report. Physiological synchrony, the degree to which physiological measurements such as electrodermal activity (EDA) of multiple people uniformly change, has been shown to covary with attentional engagement in lab settings. In this study, we moved out of the lab and monitored EDA of 30 individuals attending a real-life inaugural lecture. These individuals were labeled as belonging to either the personal or professional group, based on their relation with the speaker. We expected these groups to differ in their attentional engagement. We computed physiological synchrony between the participants and investigated how well this metric distinguished between the professional and personal groups, how well it marked predefined engaging events in the lecture, and its relation with levels of engagement as self-reported afterwards. Where possible, we compared physiological synchrony results to results based on individuals’ EDA. We found that physiological synchrony in EDA can distinguish between the two groups. Individuals’ EDA can also distinguish between the groups, if the occurrence and timing is known of an event that is expected to elicit different levels of engagement for the two groups. We further found that both synchrony and individuals’ EDA measures mark predefined engaging events with above-chance accuracies. Neither was reliably related to self-reported levels of attentional engagement, highlighting the complementary value of EDA. Our work shows the sensitivity of EDA measures in real-life conditions, where low-level sensory effects, movement and speech cannot be the explanatory factor. Ultimate applications may be in educational and entertainment domains, exploring potential differences in attentional engagement patterns between experts and novices, or different target groups in entertainment.