Identifying Symbols of the Consumer Marketplace from Human Brain Activity

Consumer neuroscience seeks to understand how consumer decisions are shaped by marketing actions. Recent research, guided by formal economic models, has made rapid progress in understanding the neural basis of value representation. These idealized models, however, rely on well-defined and stable preferences in a human population that is famously fickle, and prone to influence from subtle signals like brands, which may be unrelated to intrinsic value. An understanding of these influences is therefore critical for both our understanding of consumer decision-making, as well as potential real-world applications.