Lights, camera, electrodes!

Electrodes?

Shyam Sundar Sethuraman, director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, uses electrodes to monitor people's reactions to everything from download speed on the Internet to the size of a television screen to how seating affects enjoyment in a movie theater.

"Essentially, what we do is look at people's reactions to various stimuli," Sundar says. These stimuli include television, cable, Internet, laserdisc, and video sources.