Attention, Awareness & Conciousness

Question 1

Why Neuromarketing?

Answer 1

Traditional Neuro Marketing cannot get to your unconcious decision-making (largely unmeasured) → neuroscience

i.e. even if people say a certain brand did not have an impact on their decision, neuroscience experiments can track that it did (makeup brand was more explored, not only the color they were searching for)

Question 2

Are there unconscious indicators of decision-making?

Answer 2

Yes, there are:

Knutsen et al. (2006): Neural Predictors of Purchase

Experiment-Design:

1) Shown a product (4 sec) –> the higher activation in nucleus accumbens (ventral striatum), the likelier to buy → indicator of wanting, and indicative of product desire + highly activated in learning + decision making (part of unconsious experience)
2) Shown its price (4 sec) –> the higher activation in insula (part of the brain for emotional response), the less likely to buy
3) Choice needs to be made (4 sec) –> the higher activation in Medial Prefrontal Cortex, the likelier to buy interesting conclusion here is that

–> people felt that they made decision in last 4sec, but actually it can be analized 8-12 sec prior

Question 3

Do unconscious cues affect our decision making?

Answer 3

Yes, they can:

Pessiglione et al.: Subliminal Cues Affect Risk Taking
Experiment Design: People were shown abstract cues when doing coin-flip decisions and didn’t realize that - subconsciously - they actually affected them in a learning-process “Iguess it was just a mad guess”
–> highly engaged nuclues accumbens in unconcious learning process

Question 4

What is a fMRI?

Answer 4

functional Magnetic Responce Imaging

measures

Question 5

How does a fMRI work?

Answer 5

When neuron is active we see that it’s extracting its oxygen and energy from the blood stream locally, so fMRI measures oxygen (as magnetic), not the drop in oxygen (not significant enough) but the huge increase of fresh blood + oxygen (overshoot) afterwards

ERGO Indirect messure

Usually need a comparison so u can filter out other variables and only see whats being highlighte due to interesting variable – unique difference

Question 6

What is attention?

Answer 6

Aware focussing/selecting of our minds while neglecting other information

Example: card trick, remember one card out of 6 - in the next round it will be gone, he always gets your card bc he swops all of them

Question 7

What are the 2 processes of attention?

Answer 7

1) Bottom-up: Things that catch ur attention automatically: brightness, contrast, density, movement (aka visual saliency)

How/where?
Certain receptors in eyes → Thalamus → Primary visual cortex, here the actual bottom-up attention ocurs, creating tension, eyes are discovering changes

2) Top-down: focus ur mental energy (i.e problem-solving or reading a boring book)

How/where?
Dorsolateral prefrontal + pariatal cortex → Visual cortex
• ad effects (the longer, the likelier – even when unconciously effected by ad)

Question 8

What is Neurovision?

Answer 8

we understand visual saliency so well that we created models as Neurovision that emulate the signals our Prim Visual Cortex would send

predicts the likelihood which parts are most likely to be looked at NOT where they want to look but where they will automatically

Question 9

Ad effects on sales?

Answer 9

Positively correlated, visual attention can be influenced by ads -> the longer the ad, the more likely the sale - even if unconscious desicion - often participants would even say ad didn’t effect them

Question 10

Visual saliency on sales?

Answer 10

Christensen et al. (2005): until 200ms exposure, the visual salieny hughly impacts our choices