UC Merced

Research on engagement has exploded in recent years. It is of interest in almost any domain of human interaction from workplaces to schools, to business, to games, and many more besides. However, measuring engagement is difficult. For the most part researchers must ask participants about their engagement (which interrupts the engagement) or bring them into the lab. Here we develop a domain-neutral approach to engagement, drawing on philosophical phenomenology and complex embodied approaches to cognition. We also develop a new paradigm for analyzing mouse traces from this perspective. A phenomenological theory of engagement is presented, and two experiments are described, both of which provide evidence for that theory.