In reading, we are often engaged to the book, lose our self-awareness, transport our-
selves into the narrative world, and have deep empathy for the characters in the books.
These “absorption” phenomena have been characterized and classified based on reader’s
introspective report using the questionnaires. However this methodology relying on in-
trospective reports alone may not be accurately enough to study the absorption: the
readers in the absorption cannot reliably report their experiences, as they lose their
self-awareness to some degree by definition. This motivates this study to build an al-
ternative measures of absorption, which we can evaluate its reliability by its consistency
across multiple subjective and objective measures of reader’s states.
We conducted two experiments by employing the first author as a subject in a natural
and reader friendly situation. In the first experiment, we analyzed the cross correlation
between reader’s absorption ratings and statistics, CVR-R and fractal dimension, esti-
mated from reader’s heart rates. In the second experiment, we analyzed the relation-
ship between reader’s absorption ratings and bodily movements using the classification
tree technique. The results of these two experiments suggest that the CVR-R and the
fractal dimension estimated from heart rates, and the bodily movement can be used as
alternative measures indicating the level of reader’s absorption.
