Robustness of Physiological Synchrony in Wearable Electrodermal Activity and Heart Rate as a Measure of Attentional Engagement to Movie Clips

Abstract

Individuals that pay attention to narrative stimuli show synchronized heart rate (HR) and electrodermal activity (EDA) responses. The degree to which this physiological synchrony occurs is related to attentional engagement. Factors that can influence attention, such as instructions, salience of the narrative stimulus and characteristics of the individual, affect physiological synchrony. The demonstrability of synchrony depends on the amount of data used in the analysis. We investigated how demonstrability of physiological synchrony varies with varying group size and stimulus duration. Thirty participants watched six 10 min movie clips while their HR and EDA were monitored using wearable sensors (Movisens EdaMove 4 and Wahoo Tickr, respectively). We calculated inter-subject correlations as a measure of synchrony. Group size and stimulus duration were varied by using data from subsets of the participants and movie clips in the analysis. We found that for HR, higher synchrony correlated significantly with the number of answers correct for questions about the movie, confirming that physiological synchrony is associated with attention. For both HR and EDA, with increasing amounts of data used, the percentage of participants with significant synchrony increased. Importantly, we found that it did not matter how the amount of data was increased. Increasing the group size or increasing the stimulus duration led to the same results. Initial comparisons with results from other studies suggest that our results do not only apply to our specific set of stimuli and participants. All in all, the current work can act as a guideline for future research, indicating the amount of data minimally needed for robust analysis of synchrony based on inter-subject correlations.

Physiological synchrony in electrodermal activity predicts decreased vigilant attention induced by sleep deprivation

“…Inter-subject correlations in heart rate and EDA were both positively correlated with the number of correctly answered questions about the movie clips. In previous work we only found this relation to be statistically significant for inter-subject correlations in heart rate (Stuldreher et al, 2020b , 2023b ). Now we find that in EDA such inter-subject correlations are associated with performance as well.…”

“…Physiological synchrony was quantified with the use of inter-subject correlations. For each participant's EDA and heart rate during a given movie, inter-subject correlations were computed with the EDA and heart rate of every other participant during that same movie, following our previous procedure (Stuldreher et al, 2023b ). When averaging over the inter-subject correlations with all other participants, we obtain a metric we refer to as participant-to-group inter-subject correlation.…”

“…and featured short, moderately engaging stories. In a previous study using six of these movies we showed that they were effective in eliciting significant inter-subject correlations in EDA and heart rate (Stuldreher et al, 2023b). The order of presentation was the same for each participant.…”

“…In recent years physiological synchrony was indeed shown to reflect shared attention. When individuals attend to a joint narrative stimulus, the inter-subject correlations in the electroencephalogram (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and heart rate are higher than one would expect based on chance (Poulsen et al, 2017 ; Stuldreher et al, 2023b ). Altering the attentional focus of individuals was found to affect inter-subject correlations.…”

Exploring objective measures for assessing team performance in healthcare: an interview study

“…In the majority of these papers, team performance has been inferred using 1–2 measures, although the use of multiple modalities in one measurement would likely add value to the evaluation of team performance ( Hałgas et al, 2022 ). Moreover, most of the existing studies that have attempted to assess team performance using physiological data have focused on simple tasks that may not be directly relevant to medical procedures, and have been conducted under conditions of low movement, which may mask potential artifacts ( Stuldreher et al, 2023 ; van Eijndhoven et al, 2023 ). Therefore, it is crucial to address these limitations and ensure that future studies properly account for movement and stress artifacts to ensure the validity of performance evaluations.…”