Physiological synchrony in EEG, electrodermal activity and heart rate reflects shared selective auditory attention

Ivo V Stuldreher,Anne-Marie Brouwer,Jan B F van Erp,Nattapong Thammasan

doi:10.1088/1741-2552/aba87d

Abstract

Objective. Concurrent changes in physiological signals across multiple listeners (physiological synchrony—PS), as caused by shared affective or cognitive processes, may be a suitable marker of selective attentional focus. We aimed to identify the selective attention of participants based on PS with individuals sharing attention with respect to different stimulus aspects. Approach. We determined PS in electroencephalography (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and electrocardiographic inter-beat interval (IBI) of participants who all heard the exact same audio track, but were instructed to either attend to the audiobook or to interspersed auditory events such as affective sounds and beeps that attending participants needed to keep track of. Main results. PS in all three measures reflected the selective attentional focus of participants. In EEG and EDA, PS was higher for participants when linked to participants with the same attentional instructions than when linked to participants instructed to focus on different stimulus aspects, but in IBI this effect did not reach significance. Comparing PS between a participant and members from the same or the different attentional group allowed for the correct identification of the participant’s attentional instruction in 96%, 73% and 73% of the cases, for EEG, EDA and IBI, respectively, all well above chance level. PS with respect to the attentional groups also predicted performance on post-audio questions about the groups’ stimulus content. Significance. Our results show that selective attention of participants can be monitored using PS, not only in EEG, but also in EDA and IBI. These results are promising for real-world applications, where wearables measuring peripheral signals like EDA and IBI may be preferred over EEG sensors.

Highlights

Selective attentional engagement is critical for efficient and effective learning (Jiang et al 2001)
inter-subject correlations (ISC) are higher for participants when paired to participants from their own attentional group compared to participants from the other group
Summary of findings In the current study we determined physiological synchrony (PS) through inter-subject correlations (ISC) in EEG, electrodermal activity (EDA) and inter-beat interval (IBI) to determine the selective attentional focus of individuals who were all presented with the same auditory stimulus and were all attending to it, but were attending to different stimulus aspects

Summary

Introduction

Selective attentional engagement is critical for efficient and effective learning (Jiang et al 2001). To assist students with learning disabilities or to evaluate learning materials, it would be helpful to continuously and implicitly measure selective attentional engagement. Such continuous and implicit measures of attention may be extracted from physiological signals, such as brain potentials as measured through the electroencephalogram (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA) or heart rate. Further results suggested that the interaction between an instructor and a learner is reflected by the degree of PS in neural activity between the two (Zheng et al 2018, Bevilacqua et al 2019, Pan et al 2020). PS in brain activity has been related to attentional engagement in other settings, such as in responses to political speeches (Schmalze et al 2015) or music (Madsen et al 2019)

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