An Individualized Approach to Skin Conductance Assessment during Execution of Tasks of Different Complexities

Area of Science:

• Psychophysiology
• Cognitive Science
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Skin conductance is a common indicator of psycho-emotional stress.
• Individual differences in baseline skin conductance and response variability hinder direct comparisons between subjects.
• Existing methods struggle to account for these individual variations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an individualized approach for assessing psycho-emotional stress using real-time skin conductance.
• To enable objective comparison of cognitive load across participants with varying baseline skin conductance.
• To adapt stress assessment for tasks with differing complexity levels.

Main Methods:

• Continuous skin conductance recording during task performance.
• Participants engaged in tasks of varying complexity (simple vs. inverted text reading).
• A novel method based on ranking skin conductance values to derive relative, individualized stress metrics was proposed.

Main Results:

• Skin conductance parameters varied significantly with task complexity compared to baseline and task stages.
• Significant individual differences in skin conductance curves were observed.
• The proposed ranking method effectively normalized data, allowing for comparative analysis of cognitive load.

Conclusions:

• The developed individualized method allows for reliable comparison of psycho-emotional stress and cognitive load across subjects.
• Transitioning from absolute to relative skin conductance values is crucial for inter-subject comparability.
• This approach enhances the assessment of stress in dynamic task environments.