Stuldreher Ivo V, Brouwer Anne-Marie
Human Performance, Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), Soesterberg, The Netherlands.
Artificial Intelligence, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2025 Jun 12;20(6):e0326091. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0326091. eCollection 2025.
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.
一场演讲或讲座能吸引听众吗？尤其是在哪些时候？听众中的不同群体对同一场演讲的体验方式会有所不同吗？了解个体的注意力投入情况可能很有价值，但使用自我报告来量化却很困难。生理同步性，即多个人的生理测量指标（如皮肤电活动（EDA））均匀变化的程度，已被证明在实验室环境中与注意力投入相关。在本研究中，我们走出实验室，监测了30名参加一场现实生活中就职演讲的个体的EDA。根据这些个体与演讲者的关系，将他们分为个人组或专业组。我们预计这两组在注意力投入方面会有所不同。我们计算了参与者之间的生理同步性，并研究了该指标在区分专业组和个人组方面的表现如何，在标记讲座中预先定义的引人入胜的事件方面表现如何，以及它与事后自我报告的投入水平之间的关系。在可能的情况下，我们将生理同步性结果与基于个体EDA的结果进行了比较。我们发现EDA中的生理同步性可以区分这两组。如果已知一个预计会引发两组不同程度投入的事件的发生时间和时机，个体的EDA也可以区分这两组。我们进一步发现，同步性和个体EDA测量都能以高于随机概率的准确率标记预先定义的引人入胜的事件。两者都与自我报告的注意力投入水平没有可靠的关联，这突出了EDA的互补价值。我们的工作表明了EDA测量在现实生活条件下的敏感性，在这种情况下，低水平的感官效应、动作和言语不能作为解释因素。最终的应用可能在教育和娱乐领域，探索专家和新手之间或娱乐中不同目标群体在注意力投入模式上的潜在差异。
