Don’t quite know where the 12 days go, or how the students and I hang on, but IFS 2019 wrapped up and I had a wonderful time learning about how to measure media effects on attention and emotion with 20 fantastic new IU students.

They learned how to measure heart rate as an index of attention, and skin conductance and corrugator muscle activation as an index of intensity and direction of emotion respectively. As an educator, it’s always fun for me to watch students learn by doing. And, of course, some of them aren’t really ‘into it’ as much as the others…but that’s ok too. In the end, I think we all have fun and everyone learns at least a little.

I had taken about 7 years off from teaching in the Intensive Freshman Seminars, and in that time they had introduced a new feature: the IFS Academic Forum. This is a way for students to get accustomed to sharing the knowledge they had obtained with those who had been enrolled in some of the other IFS courses. Plus, hopefully, my students got a chance to leave their own posters and filter around the Frangipani Room on the IMU and see the posters of other classes.

After taking many years off, I am glad to have returned to the Intensive Freshman Seminar program here at IU. This is one of the several ways I’m aware of that IU tries to make a very large student body (we have over 48,000 students on campus during the average year) a bit smaller for undergraduates.

The student show up a couple weeks before move in week and actually take a 3 credit course!  There are 23 courses taught this year and they all look incredibly interesting. Mine wins the ‘longest course title’ award and is called This is Your Brain on the Media: How Video, Music, & Games Capture Your Attention and Play with Your Emotions

Our first week is in the books. We have talked about experimental design and psychophysiological measurement. We have visited the Wells Library and had an informative lecture from Meggan Press the Undergraduate Assistant Librarian about how to do successful database searches for scientific literature.

And then the students—working in groups—designed and collected their own ECG data to test hypotheses about what affects attention to media.

More about what their data suggested will be coming up later.

Sound taints every other perceptual system

I was able to spend a couple weeks visiting Fudan School of Journalism again this summer, working with my friend and colleague Shaojing Sun to help set up his lab. But, when you are out of the country during the summer, sometimes students back home can’t wait for you to return.

Such was the case with Kelsey Prena who really needed to defend her dissertation before starting her job at Boston University. And so, thanks to modern technology and Zoom teleconferencing…and a late night for me…I was able to “attend” her defense of SETBACKS AND STEP-UPS: THE EFFECTS OF THE SETBACK PUNISHMENT ON DECLARATIVE MEMORY.

Congratulations to Dr. Prena and good luck!

Several weeks ago I was about to quietly enjoy milestone in my career. Dr. Glenna Read was the first doctoral student who I advised from start-to-finish during their time in Bloomington campus. And early in March I was invited to give a talk at her first job as an Assistant Professor at the Grady College of Communications at University of Georgia.

This invitation was an honor in itself, of course, but it reminded me of my first year as an Assistant Professor at University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa when I invited my dissertation adviser, Annie Lang, to come and give the Reese Phifer Lecture to my new set of students and colleagues. So, in a nostalgic way this trip back to the south was a way for me to pay it forward.

I was happy to see that Glenna had followed the advice that Paul Bolls and I gave her in our book (and which we had received via Annie in hers), which was to set up a lab at your first job and put a sign on the door announcing it ASAP.

It is a bit temporary looking because, she is in a temporary space right now. The Grady School has redesigned a new space for her lab, to her specs, which is currently being built.

But, it was a wonderful brief trip to see my student (who actually became a colleague/collaborator very quickly during her time @ IU) begin to develop her own space, place, and research culture.

This ad was featured as a cover extension on a recent edition of Advertising Age. 

It is pretty funny to me, given the type of research I do. It is for a company that I assume does in depth interviews with members of target audiences for advertisers. It’s a jab at the trend of ad researchers toward the use of biometric (psychophysiology) to ‘really know what the consumer is thinking’ about the ad. 

Psychophysiological measures are time-intensive. And they are invasive, sometimes leaving the participant uneasy (look at that guy’s face!). The payoff is that they can tell us interesting things that the participant sometimes can’t…or won’t. 

But, of course, psychophysiological measures tell us one thing. Sometimes when we ask participants questions they tell us something different. And sometimes they tell us something that matches the physiological indications dead on. 

But, it’s important to remember to use both types of measures.  

Just read an interesting article from the BBC that talks about how climate change and human-made noises are altering the natural soundscapes.  

In it I learned the three words in the title of this piece, and was reminded of the Ted talk that I listened to once from Bernie Krause. 

Here it is:

Sounds are slowly and subtly being lost as habitats become increasingly fragmented, species become extinct and urban landscapes expand. 

This is a test post. I’m thinking about getting back to blogging.

I’m writing this while sitting in the Indy Airport waiting for the shuttle to take me back to Bloomington and my family. There is a distinct feeling of Fall in the air that I don’t remember feeling when I left on Tuesday. And there certainly wasn’t a feeling of Fall in New Orleans, the site of this years society for psychophysiological research conference.

Ask many of the faculty and grad students that work in the ICR to name the conference they would choose if they were limited to one a year, an I think it might be this one. I know that would be my answer. I always get food ideas for new ways to look at my own work (or the work of my students) from the fresh scientific perspectives on display by the keynote speakers , the panel symposia and the comments that I get by people dropping by my poster presentations of my own work.

This year the ICR attendance (current and alum) was lower than many years. But that meant I was able to spend good times with Rachel Bailey, Justin Keene, Justin’s friend and new South Dakota faculty member Brandon Nutting.  There was even brief sighting of a Lab Rat alumnae Dr. Satoko Kurita!

The work I presented was a continuation of the investigations of whether the Orienting Response that occurs when listeners are exposed to changes in the audio stream habituates after several repetitions. Think of it this way:  We know from past studies that when a radio station plays a jingle between songs to identify themselves that listeners automatically pay a little more attention to the broadcast. But what happens after a listener has had the radio on for an extended period of time?  Does the second jingle you hear automatically capture attention?  What about the third?  By measuring how the listeners’ bodies reacted while they listened, we could actually see that their heart rate responses reacted remarkably different  with each successive jingle that was played. So look at this picture.

When people have an orienting response, that is, when they automatically pay attention to something new coming into their environment, their heart rate slows down over the course of about 6 seconds.   The picture above is similar to what we get when we average the heart rate reaction after 3 different jingles listeners heard over the course of a 40-minute radio broadcast.   See the nice deceleration?  That might lead a Program Director to say “Great!  The jingle captures their attention and the will hear what station they are listening to.”

Your Automatic Response to Jingles Changes

But now, look at how the heart reacts differently depending on whether you are listening to the first, or second, or third jingle during your time with the station. (Click on the picture…it will be clearer up close!).  By the time they hear the third one their heart ACCELERATES!  This type of response is not an orienting response but something known as the Defensive Response. This is what your heart does when it is trying to block out information from further processing!  Not a good sign if you are trying to get listeners to not only know that they are listening to your station but wanting them to feel positive about the station itself.

Now, realize that in this experiment the actual jingles played were rotated across different listeners. So it’s not the case that there was one particular jingle that everyone hated. What they were defensive toward was the third time the jingle was played.  The conclusion is that jingles might not always help you so much as get your listeners to feel like your station is interrupting their music mix to do a little chest-thumping…

Another things that makes all of this even more difficult is that a Program Director has not real way of knowing…like we did in this experimental protocol…how long an individual listener has been listening to a broadcast.  We don’t know when they tune in to the normal broadcast.  Of course, it is technologically possible to know when people who are listening via streaming tune in.  And we know what the likely listening pattern of a podcast listener will be.  There are immediate ways to apply the results of this work to those types of audio productions.  Limiting the use of repetitive jingles would be a good recommendation.

The college football season started this weekend, here in Bloomington the Hoosiers hosted in-state Indiana State…and we barely held on to beat them.  In fact, fans of IU are thankful for the Minnesota Golden Gophers because they are preventing us from being the predicted cellar-dwellers of the Big 10.

And then there was the Big 10 vs SEC “showdown” Saturday night between Alabama and Michigan. The Crimson Tide handled Big Blue easily and even though this game was held in Dallas, it reminded me of my time in Tuscaloosa where I got to see the huge event that is Alabama football.

Frown Muscles more Activated in Response to Betraying Coach