Eye-Tracking, Facial expression analyses, neuro- and psychophysiological reactions in consumer behaviour studies: integration between new tools and traditional ones

Organiser: Maurizio Mauri, IULM University of Milan

Schedule: Wednesday 27 August, 10:50 - 12:30, Haakzaal

In the last decades new techniques for studying consumer reactions to certain kind of stimuli, such as pictures, packaging, advertising, and product tasting can take advantage of new tools aimed to provide more information aside traditional techniques. Amongst others, eye-tracking recordings, automatic facial emotional expression recognition, neuro- and psycho-physiological reactions represent an interesting non invasive way to study consumer behaviour. All these tools might be integrated with traditional techniques such as interviews, psychological self-reports and focus group. Even if there are disciplines, such as neuroeconomics (Rustichini et al., 2005), that already started to apply and use these techniques according to a shared scientific procedure, there is a lack of shared scientific criteria about the application of these techniques imported from neuroscience research to other social science fields, such as communication and marketing. The attempt to fill in this lack has been called “neuromarketing” (Lee, 2007), and this attempt is still controversial in the scientific community. Trying to bridge the gap between these new quantitative techniques and more traditional ones in order to study consumer behaviour is still a challenge that only research can fill in, aside the development of technological solutions, ranging from sensors enabling to capture more and more neuro- snd psychophysiological patterns to mathematical algorithms enabling to process complex dynamics, for instance papillary oscillations correlating with emotional states. All these issues, with the support of some research data carried out by the Behaviour and  Brain Lab,  will be the topics of the symposium, aimed to promote and discuss how human behaviour studies might take advantage of all these techniques not only within the  walls of laboratories but also “on field” (such as stores, supermarkets, museums, etc.) due to the implementation of wearable and wireless technology enabling to study human behaviour in the social contexts where the target phenomena that represent the object of research (such as emotional reactions) might occur in a more ecological way rather than to exclusively rely on laboratory contexts studies. Limits and advantages will be discussed both for laboratory and “in field” research.   

Presentations

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