Exploring Peripheral Physiology as a Predictor of Perceived Relevance in Information Retrieval

Peripheral physiological signals, as obtained using electrodermal activity and facial electromyography over the corrugator supercilii muscle, are explored as indicators of perceived relevance in information retrieval tasks. An experiment with 40 participants is reported, in which these physiological signals are recorded while participants perform information retrieval tasks. Appropriate feature engineering is defined, and the feature space is explored. The results indicate that features in the window of 4 to 6 seconds after the relevance judgment for electrodermal activity, and from 1 second before to 2 seconds after the relevance judgment for corrugator supercilii activity, are associated with the users' perceived relevance of information items. A classifier verified the predictive power of the features and showed up to 14% improvement predicting relevance. Our research can help the design of intelligent user interfaces for information retrieval that can detect the user's perceived relevance from physiological signals and complement or replace conventional relevance feedback.