Anne-Marie Brouwer is a senior scientist at TNO (Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, Soesterberg) and part-time full professor 'Mental State Monitoring' at Radboud University/Donders Centre in Nijmegen. Anne-Marie studied experimental psychology in Nijmegen and obtained her PhD on eye-hand coordination research in 2002 at the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. Following post-docs at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen and the University of Rochester (NY) she started working at TNO in 2007. Since 2007 her main topic of research is BCI and using brain and other physiological signals as potential sources of information about an individual’s cognitive and emotional state. Anne-Marie works on basic research projects for and in collaboration with different parties, such as basic science funds, defense, and food industry. She is dedicated to explore the added value of physiological measures, connecting lab and real life studies, discuss the challenges that still exist and finding ways to cope with these.

Abstract: Continuous and implicit measures of individuals’ attention would be useful for a range of application. Brain responses can tell us about individuals’ level and focus of attention, but it is not straightforward to retrieve this information in real life scenarios. In this talk, I will discuss research showing that the degree to which EEG signals vary in a similar way over time between individuals is associated with attentional engagement. Our findings that this also holds for other physiological signals (heart rate and skin conductance), under various real-life or life-like circumstances, and that it predicts subsequent behavior, make interpersonal physiological synchrony a promising marker of attention for applied settings as well as ecologically valid research.

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