Consumer Neuroscience

Catalog description

How can studying the brain improve our understanding of consumer behavior? While neuroscience made tremendous strides throughout the past few decades, rarely were meaningful applications developed outside of medicine. Recently, however, breakthroughs in measurement and computation have accelerated brain science, and created an array of opportunities in business and technology. Currently, applications to marketing research and product development are experiencing explosive growth that has been met with both excitement and skepticism. This mini course provides an overview of the neuroscience behind and the potential for these developments. Topics will range from well-known and widely used applications, from eye-tracking measures in the lab and the field, to emerging methods and measures such as mobile technologies, face-reading, and neural predictors of market response. This course is self-contained and has no prerequisites. However, students with some background in business, economics, psychology, and/or neuroscience are likely to find some of the material covered in this course complementary to their existing knowledge. Much of the foundational work in consumer neuroscience and neuroeconomics involves laboratory experiments. Accordingly, we will read and discuss several experimental papers and the craft of designing an experiment will occasionally be discussed. However, we will not dedicate significant time to the methodology of experimental design and analysis. As will become clear as the course progresses, “consumer neuroscience" can be used to study almost any aspect of consumer behavior.