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From Slashdot comes an interesting article in the New York Times about using fMRI to market products. The story has the requisite proof of a new trend, three examples and an anecdote. They call it neuromarketing.

Just as an aside, this word is further proof that putting “neuro-” in front of just about anything makes it immensely cooler. Just the same, the prefix “astro-” makes an everyday object state-of-the-art futura. I impatiently await the day when I can neuronavigate my astrocar.

The article itself is fairly interesting. A researcher at Emory University found that our relationship to a brand can have a strong influence over our perceptions of a product. This finding squares with plenty of other evidence. It is easy enough to accept.

There is also a claim that successful advertisements cause activation in areas associated with the conception of self. Thus is embodied statements like, “I’m a Chevy guy”. We identify ourselves with that brand in the same way we identify ourselves by adjectives like “friendly” or “hardworking”. I don’t know of other studies done on this topic, but the conclusion fits the data as the article presents it. It would be interesting to read an actual paper on this subject. In any event, this claim doesn’t seem too objectionable.

The article also mentions a study Daimler-Chrysler did, imaging men as they looked at cars.

The scientists found that the most popular vehicles — the Porsche- and Ferrari-style sports cars — triggered activity in a section of the brain called the fusiform face area, which governs facial recognition. ”They were reminded of faces when they looked at the cars,” says Henrik Walter, a psychiatrist at the University of Ulm in Germany who ran the study. ”The lights of the cars look a little like eyes.”

A few weeks ago we read a paper on this topic for CogSci 127. The researchers in that study found activation in the fusiform face area (FFA) in car experts when looking at pictures of cars. They conclude from their data that the FFA is involved in expert complex object recognition rather than specifically face recognition. Most every human is an expert in faces, so this area has been overly determined as just for faces.

Considering these results Walter’s conclusion appears remarkably facile. Further, it reveals the danger of taking complex experimental data and making sweeping conclusions like, “This area is for recognizing faces”, or “This gene will make you gay”. Journalists are often faulted with propagating these types of misunderstandings in the popular sphere, but here, and all too often, the fault lies with the scientists themselves.

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