Scanning Shoppers' Brains
Science Blog has a post about scanning shoppers' brains to try to understand what happens when they're deciding whether to buy something or not. The study was conducted as a joint project by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and the MIT Sloan School of Management, and published in the latest issue of Neuron (Abstract).
The researchers put subjects in an fMRI machine and then let them look at products on a computer screen. When they saw the products, a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens (associated with the anticipation of pleasure) was activated. Then, when they were presented with the prices (they only had $20 to spend), if the price was too high, two things happened -- the insula (associated with the experience of pain) was activated and the medial prefrontal cortex (associated with balancing gains versus losses) was deactivated.
Up to this point, it just looks like a bunch of scientific mumbo-jumbo, but here's where it starts getting interesting. By watching the rMRI images, the researchers were able to predict whether or not the subject would buy the product or not. Unfortunately, since most people don't do their shopping while lying in an fMRI machine, that's probably not going to mean much out here in the real world. At least not yet.
But what about in the future? How long before there are scanners that can monitor our brain activity while we're walking around inside a store? Will the store computer be able to watch what's happening inside our heads, and if we look at a price and our medial prefrontal cortexes deactivate, will the price of the item be automatically adjusted downward in a second-chance effort to entice us to make the purchase? Will they add brain scan information to the profiles they create for us, and use it to create more personalized advertisements and individualized prices?
And when they do all this....will we like it?
The researchers put subjects in an fMRI machine and then let them look at products on a computer screen. When they saw the products, a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens (associated with the anticipation of pleasure) was activated. Then, when they were presented with the prices (they only had $20 to spend), if the price was too high, two things happened -- the insula (associated with the experience of pain) was activated and the medial prefrontal cortex (associated with balancing gains versus losses) was deactivated.
Up to this point, it just looks like a bunch of scientific mumbo-jumbo, but here's where it starts getting interesting. By watching the rMRI images, the researchers were able to predict whether or not the subject would buy the product or not. Unfortunately, since most people don't do their shopping while lying in an fMRI machine, that's probably not going to mean much out here in the real world. At least not yet.
But what about in the future? How long before there are scanners that can monitor our brain activity while we're walking around inside a store? Will the store computer be able to watch what's happening inside our heads, and if we look at a price and our medial prefrontal cortexes deactivate, will the price of the item be automatically adjusted downward in a second-chance effort to entice us to make the purchase? Will they add brain scan information to the profiles they create for us, and use it to create more personalized advertisements and individualized prices?
And when they do all this....will we like it?
<< Home