The industry has been extremely focused on digital analytics the past few years, as perhaps it must be. Yet there’s growing interest in learning how citizens and readers respond to news, advertising and digital content. As mentioned in my last post, one goal is to determine not just what readers are looking at (analytics), another is to learn how the brain processes, absorbs, engages and remembers that content (RJI Fellow Paul Bolls’ research).
Another is to measure how citizens and readers respond to what they view or read. That’s what Dr. Rosalind Picard has been exploring the past few years as founder and director of the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge, MA. I’ll offer a brief summary, likely missing some nuances of the science. Check it out for yourself.
Readers or viewers can be fitted with a wrist or leg skin sensor that picks up brain waves and displays the changes as you read or view content. Interesting to watch how audience members reacted, up and down, while viewing a commercial or football game. Also interesting to note the difference between genders (especially for the football game). Where men spiked at touchdowns, commercials, and certain peak action on the screen, women spiked not at the action on the screen but to the energy in the room when the men cheered or yelled at the TV. Men reacted to the TV; women to the room.
Picard also said she’s beginning to test for differences between the right and left side of the brain. Her original work just put one sensor on one side, but when she switched sides, she noticed some differences. Now she’s doing more tests with sensor on both sides. She’ll report more on that later.
Coming soon is a heart or cardiac measurement tool.
Another tool already in use is facial recognition, simply using the built in camera on most laptops. That allows her to build a larger sample at lower cost than bringing in hundreds of people to her lab. The software is trained to note smiles, arched eyebrows and more.
Picard’s question for journalists: “How do you know if something you wrote is engaging?"
Her belief: Arousal predicts memory of and attention to the content.
She notes that emotions are often non-verbal and thus difficult to gauge in an interview or survey. And as RJI Fellow Paul Bolls also believes, if we can tap into that emotional connection with our readers and viewers, we’ll better engage with them and better fulfill our mission of providing an informed, enlightened electorate.
Picard doesn’t have guidelines or a template yet, but she’s working toward them.
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