Beware! Advertisers read your mind

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on February 22, 2008  
Filed Under Cognitive

First came direct marketing, then focus groups. Now, advertisers, with the help of neuroscientists, are closing in on the holy grail: mind reading. At least, that’s what is suggested in a paper published in Human Brain Mapping authored by a group of researchers in advertising and communication and neuroscience at the University of Florida.

The researchers used sophisticated brain-scanning technology to record how subjects’ brains responded to television advertisements, while simultaneously collecting the subjects’ reported impressions of the ads.

By comparing the two resulting data sets, they pinned down specific locations in the brain as the seat of many familiar emotions that ripple throughout it. The feat is another step toward gauging how people feel directly through brain-scanning technology — without relying on what they claim to be feeling, the researchers say.

“We are getting to the heart of the matter by really showing this process in the brain, and how it works,” said Jon Morris, a professor of advertising and communications and lead author of the article. “We feel that this can be used to find out what people really feel about something, whether an advertisement or any other stimulus.”

Researchers showed the subjects three television commercials advertising Coke, Evian and Gatorade, respectively, as well as an anti-fur commercial and an ad promoting teaching. To guard against preconditioned response, all the ads were at least 10 years old.

The researchers compared the activity in the subjects’ brains as recorded by fMRI machines to their reported responses on the AdSAM system. The AdSAM system lets viewers describe how they are feeling and the strength of those feelings by clicking on projections of people-like icons, a process that Morris characterised as more direct than translating feelings into words.

With several of the ads, they found the fMRI data and responses converged on two of three measures — pleasure-displeasure and excitement-calm. Under the AdSAM system, these bipolar dimensions — as well as a third, dominance-submissiveness — form the foundation for more specific emotions.

When the researchers compared the AdSAM data on pleasure-displeasure and excitement-calm to the fMRI data, they found simultaneous spikes in four different and highly localised areas of the brain. According to the article, the findings suggest “that human emotions are multidimensional, and that self-report techniques correspond to a specific task but different functional regions of the brain.”

Morris said the results are preliminary, but that follow-up studies could allow researchers to hone in on people’s feelings with great specificity. That would be attractive to advertisers for obvious reasons, but psychologists might also find the techniques useful.

Reference

Morris, J. D., Klahr, N. J., Shen, F., Villegas, J., Wright, P., He, G., Liu, Y. (in press). Mapping a multidimensional emotion in response to television commercials. Human Brain Mapping.


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