Considerations for Designing Response Quantification Procedures in Non-traditional Psychophysiological Applications

Psychophysiological assessment in the context of virtual environments is a promising means for benchmarking the efficacy and ecological validity of virtual reality scenarios. When applied to humancomputer interaction, psychophysiological and affective computing approaches may increase facility for development of the next generation of humancomputer systems. Such systems have the potential to use psychophysiological signals for user-feedback and adaptive responding. As the composition of investigating teams becomes diverse in keeping with interdisciplinary trends, there is a need to review de-facto standards of psychophysiological response quantification and arrive at consensus protocols adequately addressing the concerns of basic researchers and application developers. The current paper offers a demonstration of the ways in which such consensus scoring protocols may be derived. Electromyographic eye-blink scoring from an immersion investigation is used as an illustrative case study.