‘Methods in cognitive neuroscience’

Electroencephalogram

Khushaba et al. (2013)

Consumer neuroscience: Assessing the brain response to marketing
stimuli using electroencephalogram (EEG) and eye tracking
Motivation
Understanding the consumer decision-making process is primary for the product development
life-cycle.
Traditionally, surveys and focus groups -- subjective self-reports relying on conscious
awareness. Limitations: a number of biases – Hawthorne effect
“…People cannot (or do not want to) fully explain their preferences when explicitly asked; as
human behavior can be (and is) driven by processes operating below the level of conscious
awareness”
Neuroscientific techniques like EEG help capture direct neural responses to marketing stimuli
by measuring brain signals, to infer what are the subconscious factors that affect preference
making.
Motivation

Consumer neuroscience
Problem Statement
How to tweak commercial stimuli and present
marketing information such that the brain reacts in
a manner, favorable for higher economic activity?
Previous studies
Ohme et al. (2010): Changes in brain activity in observation of TV
commercials.
Frontal and parietal cortical spectral activity significant in memorable ads over
forgettable ones.

Costa et al. (2006), Nie et al. (2011): Film/movie stimuli.

Sad and happy scenes elicit different spatial patterns of brain responses. Alpha, beta
and gamma waves more correlated to emotional response while watching films.

This paper: Collecting both neural and preference data on what type of
crackers do people prefer (based on flavour, topping, shape)
Choice based experiment.
Methods and apparatus
Discrete choice experiment
DCEs require participants to make a series of choices (here,
with 57 unique choice sets) and indicate their most and
their least favorite options.

DCEs do not require them to articulate why they chose the

particular options. This allows us to avoid issues related to
constructed reasoning.

The participants evaluate the three cracker features (shape,

topping, flavour) to come with an overall evaluation of each
cracker. Their choices provide a discrete indicator measure
of each participant’s cracker preferences that can be
Shapes included round, triangle, and square; flavors
decomposed into separate preferences for each cracker
feature. were wheat, dark rye, and plain; toppings comprised
salt, poppy seed, and plain.
EEG – Hardware
The Emotiv EPOC wireless EEG headset, with 14 channels
and a gyroscope, facilitates high-resolution neuro-signal
acquisition and processing.
Electrodes follow the International 10–20 system, forming
7 sets of symmetric channels, with reference electrodes
above the ears for hemisphere-specific measurements.
The data is down-sampled from 2048 Hz to 128 Hz per
channel for Bluetooth transmission via USB.
Prior to use, felt pads on sensors are moistened with a
saline solution.
Eye-tracking – Hardware
Tobii X60 Eye Tracker has an accuracy of 0.5 which
averages to 15 pixels of error with a drift factor
(miniature eye movements) of less than 0.3 and a
sampling rate of 60 Hz.
The Tobii eye tracker monitored participants' eye gaze
during the experiments, and choices were
automatically recorded, allowing subsequent analysis
of EEG spectral activities using mutual information.
Tobii Studio 1.3 was employed for enabling easy
extraction and analysis of eye tracking data.
Data processing
Independent Component Analysis
(ICA) and Discrete Wavelet
Transform (DWT) were combined for
cleaning EEG signals collected by
the Emotiv EPOC headset.
The ICA-wavelet procedure involved
baseline removal, filtering, and
subsequent denoising using DWT,
eliminating artifacts due to muscle
activity, eye blinks, and electrical
noise.
How did the responses, neural information and eye
tracking come together?

The study analyzed choices made by participants regarding product preferences, specifically focusing on the
attributes of the products presented to them, such as shape, flavor, and toppings of crackers.

By integrating neural data from EEG, eye tracking data, and the participants' explicit choices, the research aimed
to uncover the underlying cognitive and emotional processes influencing these decisions. The choices selected
by participants provided direct insight into consumer preferences, which, when correlated with the EEG and eye
tracking data, helped identify the neural correlates of decision-making in a marketing context.
Main results
Recall…
The study used neuroscience methods to investigate the physiological decision processes underlying consumer
preferences for crackers.
It not only analyzed cortical activity and interdependencies among EEG signals but also provided a quantification of
the importance of different cracker features in shaping product design preferences
The patterns of cortical activity were obtained in the five principal frequency bands, Delta (0–4 Hz), Theta (3–7 Hz),
Alpha (8–12 Hz), Beta (13–30 Hz), and Gamma (30–40 Hz).
EEG power spectrum analysis
The average time across all participants
decreased at a decreasing rate in terms of time
spent ”looking” at each of the 57 choice sets as
participants became more and more familiar
with the cracker options by the end of the
experiment.
Synchrony
We used the Phase Locking Value (PLV) as a measure
of synchrony:
1
𝑃𝐿𝑉 = | σ𝑁
𝑛=1 exp(𝑗𝜙(𝑡, 𝑛)|
𝑁

where 𝜙 𝑡, 𝑛 is the phase difference 𝜙1 𝑡, 𝑛 −

𝜙2 𝑡, 𝑛 of the EEG signals from two brain regions.
The approach to calculating synchrony in a precise
frequency range between two recording sites is to
calculate this quantity for each of the alpha, beta,
theta, gamma and delta bands to detect what brain
regions and which EEG bands are getting phase-
synchronised.
Experimental results
•The PLV results suggest few important findings,
including that the frontal channels (AF3–AF4 and F3–F4)
and occipital channel (O1–O2) were the most
synchronized channels, which in turn indicates the
importance of cognitive processing taking place at these
brain regions.
•The PLV was also calculated at each frequency band for
all the couples of possible electrodes, rather than just
the symmetric ones. In this case the set of frontal
channels represented by AF3, F3, F4, and AF4 showed the
highest PLVs among each other at all of the θ, α, and β
bands.
•We used analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test for significant differences between actual δ band feature
values from different EEG channels (significant level is reported at p < 0.05). The results indicated
significant differences between δ band features from each channel indicated in parentheses in the left
(AF3, F3, FC5, T7) and right hemispheres (AF4, F4, FC6, T8). All these tests were associated with a p-
values < 0.001.

•Theta band power exhibited the highest level of mutual information with the cracker characteristics
measures over the left occipital region and to some extent bilaterally over the frontal regions (F4 and F3).
This suggests that changes in θ are correlated with changes in preferences.

•Our results for θ also suggest that the different toppings had the largest impact on preferences due to
high dependence between the stated preferences and θ power changes on the left occipital region.
•On the other hand, The mutual information values achieved by β further supports our finding that flavor
and toppings had larger impacts on preferences than shape, as we found higher mutual information
values for β with flavor and topping preferences than for shape preferences.

•Gamma also exhibited high mutual information values with flavor and topping preferences on bilateral
frontals and left temporal regions. This may be due to familiarity with the visual stimulus and degree of
preference for it modulating the induced EEG activity in the γ band, resulting in higher dependence
between γ band power and flavor and topping preferences than shape preferences.

•Finally, changes in the total power spectrum also suggested the importance of the frontal, temporal, and
occipital regions, while also suggesting more importance for flavor and topping preferences than shapes.
ANOVA test results further confirmed the significant differences across the different channels on β as well
as on γ power features, with an achieved p-value ⩽0.001 for all tests.
Limitations
In the final part of this experiment, it should be noted that a key limitation of this research was a wide
variation in the amounts of EEG data available for each person in each choice set. This in turn resulted in
having insufficient EEG observations in some choice sets to reliably estimate the effects of the attribute
levels on the EEG measures.

Future work should try to deal with this issue, and one way to do that would be to present the crackers (or
more generally, stimuli with varying features) individually one-at-a-time to ensure that there is no confound.
A second possibility is to present the items in each choice set one-at-a-time, and then observe the choices
in each set collectively.

Portable EEGs vs full blown EEGs: The Emotiv headset, although cost-effective, has a less number of
electrodes, has less signal-to-noise ratio, wireless connections brings latency and connection issues.
Summary
1. EEG Power Spectral Activities:
• Significant changes(p<0.01) in EEG power spectral activities were observed during the choice task,
particularly in the frontal (delta, alpha, and beta across F3, F4, FC5, and FC6), temporal (alpha, beta,
gamma across T7), and occipital (theta, alpha, and beta across O1) regions.
2. Phase Synchronization and Interhemispheric Communications:
• Clear phase synchronization between the left and right frontal and occipital regions was observed,
indicating interhemispheric communications during the choice task.
• This synchronization suggests coordinated neural activity between these regions in response to the
decision-making process related to cracker preferences.
3. Importance of Cracker Flavors and Toppings:
• Mutual information analysis emphasized that flavors and toppings of the crackers played a more
significant role in influencing buying decisions compared to the shapes of the crackers.
Thank you!