Neural predictors of purchase-behaviour from EEG during passive viewing of products.

Some neuromarketing companies claim to be able to predict purchase behaviour by measuring brain activity during passive viewing of commercials. Here, we test if it is possible to obtain valid neural predictors of purchase behaviour during passive viewing. In our experiment we focus on 3 main factors that can influence the decision to purchase an item: Attention, Approach/withdrawal motivation and Memory. We test how well neural indicators of these three processes predict purchase-behaviour. While recording their EEG, subjects (n = 30) view 18 trailers of movies. Trailers are selected from four categories of movie genres and unfamiliar to participants. After each trailer, participants indicate their feelings about the movie (using the PANAS scale), their liking (on a scale from 1 to 10) and their willingness to pay for the movie (using the BDM auction method). Finally, after participants have watched all the 18 movie trailers we ask them to rank the DVD's of the movies and have them choose three DVDs to take home. It is our aim to predict which movies subjects will select to take home with our neural measurements, above and beyond of what can be predicted by their revealed preference (i.e. their liking-rating and their willingness to pay for the product). In a second session, one week later, we test for recognition of the products (DVDs) and relate this memory performance to our neural measurements. We started the collection of the data. At the time of the conference, first results will be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]