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Main Authors: Sharma, Mansi, Duchevet, Alexandre, Daiber, Florian, Imbert, Jean-Paul, Rekrut, Maurice
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09799
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author Sharma, Mansi
Duchevet, Alexandre
Daiber, Florian
Imbert, Jean-Paul
Rekrut, Maurice
author_facet Sharma, Mansi
Duchevet, Alexandre
Daiber, Florian
Imbert, Jean-Paul
Rekrut, Maurice
contents Unexpected events can impair attention and delay decision-making, posing serious safety risks in high-risk environments such as aviation. In particular, reactions like startle and surprise can impact pilot performance in different ways, yet are often hard to distinguish in practice. Existing research has largely studied these reactions separately, with limited focus on their combined effects or how to differentiate them using physiological data. In this work, we address this gap by distinguishing between startle and surprise events based on physiological signals using machine learning and multi-modal fusion strategies. Our results demonstrate that these events can be reliably predicted, achieving a highest mean accuracy of 85.7% with SVM and Late Fusion. To further validate the robustness of our model, we extended the evaluation to include a baseline condition, successfully differentiating between Startle, Surprise, and Baseline states with a highest mean accuracy of 74.9% with XGBoost and Late Fusion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_09799
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distinguishing Startle from Surprise Events Based on Physiological Signals
Sharma, Mansi
Duchevet, Alexandre
Daiber, Florian
Imbert, Jean-Paul
Rekrut, Maurice
Machine Learning
Human-Computer Interaction
Unexpected events can impair attention and delay decision-making, posing serious safety risks in high-risk environments such as aviation. In particular, reactions like startle and surprise can impact pilot performance in different ways, yet are often hard to distinguish in practice. Existing research has largely studied these reactions separately, with limited focus on their combined effects or how to differentiate them using physiological data. In this work, we address this gap by distinguishing between startle and surprise events based on physiological signals using machine learning and multi-modal fusion strategies. Our results demonstrate that these events can be reliably predicted, achieving a highest mean accuracy of 85.7% with SVM and Late Fusion. To further validate the robustness of our model, we extended the evaluation to include a baseline condition, successfully differentiating between Startle, Surprise, and Baseline states with a highest mean accuracy of 74.9% with XGBoost and Late Fusion.
title Distinguishing Startle from Surprise Events Based on Physiological Signals
topic Machine Learning
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09799