Preliminary research proposal advanced neuro-imaging of commercial messages

PRELIMINARY RESEARCH PROPOSAL ADVANCED NEURO-IMAGING OF COMMERCIAL MESSAGES by Rafael Malach* Jacob Hornik** Tomer Bakalash** Talma Hendler** Working Paper No. 24/2005 December 2005

Research No. 02350100

** Weizmann Institute of Science ** Faculty of Management, The Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. This paperwas partially financed by the Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel. The Institute’s working papers are intended for preliminary circulation of tentative research results. Comments are welcome and should be addressed directly to the authors. The opinions and conclusions of the authors of this study do not necessarily state or reflect those of The Faculty of Management, Tel AvivUniversity, or the Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel.

Scientific Abstract : Recent developments in brain scanning techniques have led the field of cognitive neuroscience into a deeper understanding of the neural bases of human cognition and behavior. This interdisciplinary field of research have expanded rapidly in the last decade (Hagoort, 2001; Savoy, 2001), and in the nearfuture neuroscience findings and methods will undoubtedly play an increasingly prominent role in economics and other social sciences (Chorvat, McCabe and Smith, 2004). A new area of research that has been named “neuroeconomics” or “neuromarketing” has already formed the basis of numerous academic and conferences economists that have brought neuroscientists, several recent together1,

psychologistsproducing

publications (Rossiter et al. 2001; Breiter et al. 2001; smith et al. 2002). One of main issues in marketing research is advertising and their effect on consumers. Considerable research into advertising effectiveness has been done over the past 100 years and numerous theories have emerged, many of them focusing on the rationale behind advertisements and their ability to changethinking about brands. An underlying economic, rational, argument to brand choice among consumers has been widely assumed. But now a new direction is emerging with the application of neuroscience to determine the impact of advertisements by capturing the brain’s response to stimuli (Ambler and Rose, 2001). This enables comparison of rational and emotional reactions.

The first meeting was held atCarnegie-Mellon in 1997. Later meetings were held in Arizona and Princeton in 2001, in Minnesota in 2002 and on Martha’s Vineyard in 2003. Occasional sessions devoted to this rapidly-growing topic are now common at large annual meetings in economics, marketing and neuroscience.

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Brain imaging is certainly the most intensively used neuroscientific tool. Among brain imaging tools, functionalmagnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is currently most widely used and considered to be the edge of technology in this field. The conventional approach of using fMRI, to study brain responses to sensory stimulation, use static, simplified and highly controlled stimuli, in which the subjects are requested to constantly maintain a visual fixation. However, such methods are too far from the natural,daily life stimuli, and are not of much use to the marketing and advertising research fields. Recently, Professor Rafael Malach of Weizmann Institute of Science, has found that free viewing of natural dynamics, audio-visual stimuli, such as edited video clips, or even entire segments of popular movies, produce a consistent and highly reproducible brain activation, far exceeding the conventionallyproduced maps. Moreover, despite the complex and multidimensional stimuli, there was a striking similarity between subjects’ brain activation maps. Despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains “tick together” in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment (Hasson et al, 2004), likely due to the highly engaging power of the...