Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Conventional seated audiences have relatively restricted op-portunities for response. Perhaps the most salient is applausebut they use their hands to make other visible movements: tofix hair, adjust glasses, scratch ears. The question we addresshere is whether these apparently incidental movements mayprovide systematic clues about an audience’s level of engage-ment with a performance. We investigate this in the contextof contemporary dance performances by analysing audiencehand movements in four performances at the London Contem-porary Dance School. Hand movements were tracked using areflective wristband worn by each audience member. A blobdetection algorithm applied to the video recording examinedwhether changes in hand movement are associated with audi-ence arousal levels to the performance. The results show thathands move least during the most preferred and most duringthe least preferred dance pieces. We conclude that still handsare a signal of higher levels of engagement.