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

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Media Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Audience immersion involves shifting attention and allocating cognitive resources to media content.
• Measuring immersion in real-time using continuous behavioral and physiological data is an ongoing challenge.
• Previous research lacks validated, objective measures for audience engagement during media consumption.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the feasibility of using continuous behavioral and physiological measures to assess audience immersion.
• To validate dual-task reaction times, heart rate, and skin conductance against self-reported narrative engagement.
• To establish reliable, real-time metrics for quantifying audience immersion in media.

Main Methods:

• Participants viewed television and film clips.
• Continuous data collection included dual-task reaction times, heart rate, and skin conductance.
• Measures were validated against self-reported levels of narrative engagement and immersion.

Main Results:

• Slower reaction times to a secondary task strongly correlated with higher self-reported immersion, especially emotional engagement.
• Synchrony in heart rate among participants was associated with self-reported attentional and emotional engagement.
• Skin conductance did not show a significant relationship with self-reported immersion metrics.

Conclusions:

• Dual-task reaction times serve as a promising behavioral measure for real-time audience immersion assessment.
• Heart rate synchrony offers a physiological indicator of shared attentional and emotional engagement with media.
• These findings establish objective, continuous measures for understanding audience immersion in media studies.