Cognitive arousal-based measures quantify insights from self-ratings in response to sensory stimuli

Abstract

Reliable quantification of patients’ cognitive arousal is a challenging problem and a pertinent clinical need in various mental health applications. Recently, skin conductance-based cognitive state estimation has shown promise in inferring the cognitive arousal of individuals caused by autonomic nervous system (ANS) activation. Here, we use a physiological model of ANS-stimulated skin conductance modulations and Bayesian filtering to analyze changes in cognitive arousal induced by auditory, visual, and haptic stimuli. Our findings indicate that cognitive arousal-based measures are in better agreement with self-ratings-based metrics than inferred autonomic nervous system activation events in response to sensory stimuli. These insights on cognitive arousal increase our understanding of psychophysiology and may help diagnose, track, and treat symptoms of mental health disorders in the future by providing clinicians with a framework to estimate and modulate arousal levels in an interactive sensory stimulation environment. Author summary: In this work, we find that measures derived from continuous skin conductance measurements effectively convey insights on self-perceived arousal in response to visual, auditory and haptic stimuli. The conclusions from this analysis will contribute towards the quantification, tracking and eventually modulation of cognitive states during human-computer interactions (e.g., workplace or virtual reality settings) for entertainment as well as for non-invasive, non-pharmacological closed-loop mental health interventions.

Publication information

Originally published in PLOS Mental Health on 2025-11-12. Original DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000463.

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