Indexing Cognitive Load using Blood Volume Pulse Features.

Physiological responses contain rich affective information even when humans are not expressing any external signs. In this paper, we investigate the use of the Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) signals for indexing cognitive load. An experiment, which introduced cognitive load as a secondary task in a decision making context was conducted in the study. BVP signals were analyzed in order to establish relationships between BVP and cognitive load levels. A set of features (e.g. peak and max features) was found to be significantly distinctive across different cognitive load levels. The identified BVP features can be used to set up machine learning models for the automatic classification of CL levels in intelligent systems.