Brain Scans Reveal Unconscious Shopping Desires

A new study suggests that brain scans can identify whether a consumer intends to buy a product, even when they are not consciously considering their choices.

For the analysis, John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, attempted to predict which cars people might unconsciously favour.

Researchers used MRI to scan the brains of two groups of male volunteers, who were presented with images of three cars and asked which they would prefer to buy.

One group was asked to rate their impressions of the cars, while the second group were given distracting visual tasks to perform, while images of the vehicles were presented in the background.

The researchers found that when volunteers first looked at the car that they would subsequently 'buy', specific patterns of brain activity could be seen in the brain's areas that are associated with preferences and emotion.

According to the study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, these patterns of activity reflected the volunteers' subsequent purchasing choice nearly three-quarters of the time, whether or not the subjects had given their attention to the images of the cars when they were shown them.

Haynes says that the brain appears to impart automatic, or possibly unconscious value onto products as soon as a consumer is exposed to them.

He adds that this kind of approach might be particularly useful for inferring people's opinions of products they would be reluctant to admit to buying.

Web site: www.bccn-berlin.de .