Shared attention reflected in eeg, electrodermal activity and heart rate

Monitoring directed auditory attention in groups can be helpful in a range of contexts. Concurrent change in physiological variables across multiple listeners (physiological synchrony – PS) may be a suitable marker of attentional focus as caused by shared affective or cognitive processes. We here determine PS for EEG (electroencephalography), EDA (electrodermal activity) and heart rate in participants who were instructed to either attend to an audiobook (n = 13) or to interspersed auditory events (n = 13) such as emotional sounds, and beeps that attending participants needed to keep track of. Even though all participants heard the exact same audio track, for both EEG and EDA, PS was higher for participants linked to participants in their own attentional group than to participants in the other attentional group. No such effect was found in heart rate. For a single individual, EEG PS allowed attribution to the correct attentional group in 85% of the cases, for EDA this was 81%. Hearing is not the same as attending - our results are promising for monitoring group affective and cognitive processes and how an individual relates to that. Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors.