Using galvanic skin response for cognitive load measurement in arithmetic and reading tasks

Abstract

Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) has recently attracted researchers' attention as a prospective physiological indicator of cognitive load and emotions. However, it has commonly been investigated through single or few measures and in one experimental scenario. In this research, aiming to perform a comprehensive study, we have assessed GSR data captured from two different experiments, one including text reading tasks and the other using arithmetic tasks, each imposing multiple cognitive load levels. We have examined temporal and spectral features of GSR against different task difficulty levels. ANOVA test was applied for the statistical evaluation. Obtained results show the strong significance of the explored features, especially the spectral ones, in cognitive workload measurement in the two studied experiments.