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Scientists peer into brain to make better advertisement sense

Scientists are using EEG and MRI to monitor brain waves in the audience reporting their reactions

Paris: Companies will be able to test public reactions to advertisements, music and films before they are released by monitoring the brain signals of a select group of viewers.

So say psychologists who on Tuesday unveiled the results of an unusual set of experiments into so-called neural signals.

Reporting in Nature Communications, a team led by Jacek Dmochowski at Stanford University in California asked 16 volunteers aged 19-32 to watch TV as their brain signals were recorded.

They watched the 2010 premiere episode of the popular TV series The Walking Dead and a set of commercials which first aired in American football’s Super Bowl in 2012 and 2013.

The volunteers wore electroencephalography (EEG) sensors to monitor electrical activity in the various parts of the brain and were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which maps brain activity by pinpointing cerebral blood flow.

What emerged was a strong correlation in the pattern of signals, showing that the individuals were all “engaged” in what they saw.

Their level of interest matched the response of the wider public to the show and to the commercials as measured by Twitter and the Nielsen audience rating.

( Source : AFP )
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