Exploring Attention and Social Connection Through Art and Neuroscience

Returning to Neurolive

Back in 2023, we featured the Neurolive project in a Community Story when researchers transformed a live dance performance into an ambitious real-world neuroscience experiment. During How Shall We Begin Again?, a two-day live installation initiated by artist Jo Fong, audience members wore up to 20 Pupil Invisible eye tracking glasses alongside mobile ANT EEG while watching a continuously unfolding performance by 50 performers.

At the time, the data had only just been collected. The big questions were still open: Where would audiences direct their visual attention? How would their brain activity change throughout the performance? And could these signals tell us something about engagement and the connection people felt with the performers?

Three years later, the team has now published the results of this work, showing how audience gaze, subjective attention, and felt social connection relate during live dance.

Measuring Attention Without Interrupting the Performance

How Shall We Begin Again? ran for 16 hours across two days at Siobhan Davies Studios in London. Fifty performers took turns presenting approximately 25-minute improvised performances, while audience members were free to enter, choose where to sit, and leave when they wished, simply watching without the need to report on their experience during the show.

This freedom was important because repeatedly asking spectators what they were thinking or feeling would have interrupted the natural flow of the experience the researchers wanted to study. Instead, they combined pre- and post-performance questionnaires with where people looked during the show.

Audience members wore Pupil Invisible eye tracking glasses alongside ANT Neuro mobile EEG. The team used Lab Streaming Layer and Pupil Labs' Real-time API as part of their synchronization workflow, while Pupil Cloud supported data logistics and automatic backups after the long recording sessions.

The eye tracking data proved particularly robust in this demanding real-world setup, with recordings collected from 83 participants. The final statistical analysis included 45 participants, with most exclusions resulting from incomplete questionnaire data rather than issues with the eye tracking recordings.

Turning Gaze Into a Measure of Audience Attention

With hours of first-person video from a moving, changing performance, manually labeling where every spectator looked would have been impractical. Instead, to measure how much visual attention spectators directed toward people during each performance, the researchers used DensePose, a computer vision model that detects human bodies in images.

They processed each participant's scene video using DensePose to locate people and compared those locations with the corresponding gaze position. They then calculated the percentage of frames in which gaze landed over a detected human body.

Across the dataset, spectators looked at people for an average of about 61% of frames.

This gave the researchers an overall behavioral measure of visual attention that could be compared with what spectators later reported about each performer.

Looking, Focusing, and Feeling Connected

One of the study's main questions was how looking, feeling focused, and feeling connected related to one another. The researchers investigated this by pairing eye tracking with post-performance questionnaires, in which participants rated both how focused they had been on each performer and how connected they felt to them.

Spectators who looked at people in the scene more tended to report being more focused on the performer. In turn, spectators who felt more focused also tended to feel more connected to that performer. Looking more, however, was not by itself significantly associated with stronger connection.

In other words, gaze was linked to connection through the spectator's own sense of focus. The findings do not show that looking at someone causes a feeling of connection, but they suggest that visual attention, perceived focus, and felt connection are closely related parts of the audience experience.

Interestingly, most spectators did not know the performers beforehand, and prior familiarity was not significantly related to felt connection. This suggests that a sense of connection could emerge during the live performance itself rather than simply reflecting an existing relationship with the performer.

Figure 2: Relationship between gaze, self-reported focus, and felt social connection. Spectators who looked at people in the scene more tended to report greater focus on the performer, and greater focus was associated with stronger felt connection. The indirect relationship through focus was significant, while the direct relationship between gaze and connection was not. Source: Arthuis, A., Abad-Hernando, S., Kokkinou, A., Febbo, M., Rai, L. A., Lee, H., Sperling, M., Ward, J. A., Richardson, D. C., & Orgs, G. (2026). Audience gaze and felt social connection with individual performers during live dance. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1564(1), e70412. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.70412

What Happens When Music Enters the Performance?

The mobile EEG data showed that audience brain activity also changed with the context of the performance. During sections accompanied by music, alpha-band power decreased, consistent with greater arousal and attentional demand, while delta and gamma power increased, perhaps reflecting stronger rhythmic entrainment of audience members to the music, meaning that brain activity may have been more synchronized with the rhythm of the music.

The researchers also found higher theta power during group performances than during solo performances. This could reflect the greater social, attentional, or perceptual demands of watching several performers at once, although these different influences could not be separated in the study.

They also explored whether EEG activity was related to gaze, subjective focus, or felt connection. Although some initial relationships appeared, they were not robust once differences between participants were taken into account. EEG therefore did not provide a reliable marker of how connected someone felt to an individual performer.

Bringing Neurolive Full Circle

When we first covered Neurolive, the experiment demonstrated something important before any results were available: it was possible to take eye tracking and neuroscience out of the laboratory and into a genuinely live, collective experience, with up to 20 Pupil Invisible systems running simultaneously alongside mobile EEG over 16 hours of live performance.

Now, the published findings give us a clearer picture of what this approach can reveal.

On one hand, questionnaires can tell us how connected or focused someone remembers feeling. On the other hand, wearable eye tracking adds a continuous behavioral record of how attention was allocated while the experience was actually happening.

Bringing those measures together showed that audience engagement was not only about what happened on stage. It was also related to how spectators directed their visual attention and how focused they felt on individual performers.

That is particularly valuable for studying social experiences, which unfold continuously and can easily be disrupted by repeatedly asking people what they are thinking or feeling. Wearable eye tracking makes it possible to capture part of that experience as it happens, while preserving much more of the natural setting.

Neurolive began by asking what makes a live experience feel live. These findings bring us a little closer to understanding how attention, people, and felt connection come together during live performance.

Further Resources

• Full article: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.70412

• Neurolive Community Story: What makes live experiences special? Fusing art and science with Neurolive

• Curious about mapping gaze onto specific body parts? Check out our dedicated Alpha Lab guide, where we use DensePose with Pupil Invisible and Neon to automatically detect body regions and map gaze onto them.

• Neurolive Project Page: https://neurolive.info

• Research Centers:

  • Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK

  • Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, City St George's, University of London, London, UK

  • Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

  • School of Mind, Body and Society, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

  • Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, UK

  • Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health, University College London, London, UK

  • Siobhan Davies Studios, London, UK