香港六合彩中特网

How engaged are you when you listen to a story on an audiobook? Audible and Professor Joe Devlin (Vice-Dean Enterprise for Brain Sciences) worked together to find out.

Setting the scene

Audible wanted to find out more about their listeners so 香港六合彩中特网 Consultants (a part of Innovation & Enterprise) introduced them to Professor Joe Devlin.

Joe was honest 鈥� a lot of that research is already available. But he also did some digging. He wrote a report listing what鈥檚 already known and what鈥檚 not. For example, how do different genres affect your brain? Or, how do emotional responses in your brain vary whether you鈥檙e listening to a story or watching it on screen? There鈥檚 some low level research already done on the latter question, but there wasn鈥檛 much known about how it actually engages you as a listener.

So Joe and his team in the Department of Experimental Psychology set off to find out how people physically respond to stories when listening to them and when watching them.

They ran experiments with roughly 100 volunteers across a large demographic. Each participant listened and watched a particularly dramatic scene that was as similar as possible in narrative in both the audio and visual versions. They were given one of eight stories: Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice,听The Silence of the Lambs,听A Study in Scarlett,听The Da Vinci Code,听The Girl on the Train,听Alien,听or A Game of Thrones.

Each participant鈥檚 physiological responses were measured 鈥� their heart rate, their galvanic skin response (a measure of emotional arousal), and their body temperature 鈥� to see how emotional they got when they heard, or saw, scenes like Ned Stark losing his head, or the alien bursting out of Kane鈥檚 chest.

A surprising result听

When asked about their experience of these clips, participants of Joe鈥檚 experiments said they felt they paid more attention and felt more in the story when watching it.听

But, looking at the physiological data, the team found the participant鈥檚 physical reactions were completely the opposite of what they thought they were experiencing.

On average, participants鈥� heart rate went up by two beats a minute when listening to the audio. The results were remarkably consistent and didn鈥檛 vary by age or gender, so the chance of an error was less than 1 in 100,000.

Their body temperature also rose when listening to the audio version, and they had a stronger galvanic skin response too. All three of these are indictors that you鈥檙e doing more work, and by doing more work you鈥檙e engaging more deeply. 听

And the relationship grew

The success of this project has led to an ongoing relationship between 香港六合彩中特网 and Audible. There have been talks of a number of spin-off projects, including research around empathy when listening to stories through different channels.听

Don Katz, Audible founder and CEO, said: 鈥淭his first phase of 香港六合彩中特网 research confirms what millions of Audible listeners already know 鈥� the spoken word enthrals, entertains, inspires and, most importantly, moves us like nothing else.鈥�

Joe Devlin said: 鈥淭rying to bridge some of the gaps between academics and industry is super exciting. The first step is recognising those gaps, and the second is being able to speak a common enough language set that you can communicate effectively in these areas. And that鈥檚 where the people in Innovation & Enterprise are invaluable.鈥�

The story went to press on 21 June 2018, and the findings from the study can be found on bioRxiv. The research will be submitted to a peer reviewed journal in Autumn 2018.

Watch a film of Joe discussing听his research

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Links

Find out more about:

• the research in the听
• 香港六合彩中特网 Faculty of Brain Sciences

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