Audience immersion: validating attentional and physiological measures against self-report

Abstract

When an audience member becomes immersed, their attention shifts towards the media and story, and they allocate cognitive resources to represent events and characters. Here, we investigate whether it is possible to measure immersion using continuous behavioural and physiological measures. Using television and film clips, we validated dual-task reaction times, heart rate, and skin conductance against self-reported narrative engagement. We find that reaction times to a secondary task were strongly positively correlated with self-reported immersion: slower reaction times were indicative of greater immersion, particularly emotional engagement. Synchrony in heart rate across participants was associated with self-reported attentional and emotional engagement with the story, although we found no such relationship with skin conductance. These results establish both dual-task reaction times and heart rate as candidate measures for the real-time, continuous, assessment of audience immersion.

Inter-subject correlation of audience facial expressions predicts audience engagement during theatrical performances

“… 29 For example, synchronization in audience heart rates is related to self-reported narrative engagement when viewing television and film content. 19 Furthermore, during music listening, high ISCs of facial muscles, cardiorespiratory, and skin conductance responses were consistently related to periods of arousing emotions and audience engagement. 18 Whereas peak correlations in neural activity measured using electroencephalography (EEG) correspond also with arousing moments during film viewing and reflect attention- and emotion-modulated processing.…”

“…Indeed, studies have recently shown that the degree of audience engagement is reflected in the synchrony between a range of different physiological 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 and neural 21 , 22 , 23 signals of audience members. These methods were originally developed to analyze the reliability of responses of multiple individuals during the multidimensional dynamics of real-world social contexts.…”

Evaluating the Influence of Room Illumination on Camera-Based Physiological Measurements for the Assessment of Screen-Based Media

“…Narrative engagement can also be effectively assessed using psychophysiological methods. Research has demonstrated that when individuals watch screen-based media, changes in physiological features such as heart rate and gaze position correlate between those who feel engaged [14][15][16]. Psychophysiological methods have also been used extensively for assessing experiences in the domain of extended reality research [17].…”