Welcome back to this course in consumer neuroscience and neuro-marketing.
drives our attention, our willful focusing on something, automatic attention.
what we don't experience even though our minds are working at full speed.
First, let's start with a definition of attention.
And if we work back to William James more than a century ago.
He focused on what attention was.
He said, well what is attention?
Well, it's the focusing of our minds in clear and vivid form.
And it's also a selection process.
So in order to focus on some things we need to reject other things.
We can't focus on all things at once basically.
things in order to process the things we focus on much more and much better.
And let's do a little card trick.
What I want you to do is to pick a card.
there going to be present on the screen for a few seconds.
Just pick one card and remember the card.
think about the card because now I'm going to take that card away.
Let's do it again, and this time, pick another card.
I'm going to show you a set of cards.
Now, pick another card and remember that card.
And now I'm taking it away again.
Now you realized that the card trick was just a trick.
The reason that the card trick works is because that I'm changing all the cards.
What this card trick tells us is that our attention is limited.
While you're focusing on one card, you can't focus in on all the other cards.
The way we tend to think about this is that attention is like a bottleneck.
expect that your brain can capture all that information.
Attention can only focus on some things at one time at the cost of other things.
different processes, one that is called bottom-up and one that is called top-down.
You can think of this one.
Imagine that you're going into a store and you're looking for something particular.
This is a top-down search.
You're looking for some orange juice, for example.
Within the store, you're accidentally bumping into things.
You see a piece of chocolate, for example.
You didn't intend to buy it.
You didn't intend to look for it.
But you are accidentally looking at it.
This is what we can call bottom-up attention.
And today, we're going to talk about bottom-up versus top-down.
these are the things that automatically grab your attention.
movement, and so forth are things that automatically grab your eye's attention.
You automatically start to look at them.
like colors shapes densities that basically attract your eyes automatically.
that are more responsive to some things than other such as contrast and density.
a deep structure of the brain.
What happens is that your eyes are detecting some changes.
they are projecting that back to the brain.
to the visual cortex, the primary visual cortex.
And at this stage, this is where the bottom of attention occurs.
changing the saliency, the visual appearance of a product.
People are more likely to look at it, and also more likely to buy it.
look at it automatically, and also the likelihood that they're going to buy it.
I urge to, to read that paper as soon as you can.
that we know this process so well.
We understand the brain basis of exactly what's going on.
And this allows us to make models, mathematical computational models.
visual cortex receives signals from the eyes and processes that information.
look at particular parts of a screen or part of the visual work.
Having this tool allows researchers to automatically analyze images and videos.
point to regions that are most likely to grab people's attention automatically.
it tells what people are automatically going to look at.
The opposite example is top-down attention.
we can think of top-down attention as the exact opposite of that.
This is where you need to focus your mental energy.
look at such as reading a boring book for example.
I want you to solve this task that, that you see on the screen right now.
There's a puzzle missing in the piece to your left.
And there are five different options.
The only one option is the correct one.
you can't at the same time think about what you're doing tomorrow.
this is problem solving task is a very good example of that.
we can see a different network at stake.
the parietal part of the brain in, is engaged.
other visual regions of the brain.
Take this example of an in store walk.
people are looking while they are walking down the store.
they're orienting themselves, looking at different signs.
they're not looking at everything at once.
the visual attention that people are showing is a limited attentions span.
They're looking at some things, at the cost of other things.
Let's take the example of in-store attention.
So I briefly explain last time we run a study in an retail environment.
unbenounced to them one of those ads were for particular brand.
all the other ads except that particular ad.
wearing height tracking glasses and EG equipments.
also at their emotional cognitive responses while they were in the store.
What we gave them was a set of different tasks.
which we intermixed on the task list.
and we were interested in when they reached the paint shelf.
There were two different experimental groups.
One group that saw a 50-second version of the ad.
And another group that saw a 30-second version of the ad.
So, 91% sales of the, of that brand.
Those who saw the 30-second version of the ad had an 100% sales.
we asked every participant why they had bought that particular brand of paint.
What we got was a lot of interesting answers.
But not the answer we were looking for.
the brand, but they didn't link seeing the ad with buying the brand.
no, they didn't think they were affected by the ad.
visual attention while they were in the store facing the shelves.
those groups that had seen the ad explored the shelves much more.
that people are exploring the shelves much more than the control group.
even when we are unaware of those effects.
other consumer communications without being aware of those.
even in this store environment.
And help us understand the consumer buying process.
We'll now turn to the topic of consciousness.
once you start thinking about it, might not be that easy after all.
Is it a long time since you were unconscious?
You probably would say, yes, that's a long time, lad.
That's false, because every single night, you're unconscious during your deep sleep.
So, in this way, we can think about consciousness as a state.
like to be awake during the day.
As opposed to being in deep sleep, in coma or under general anaesthesia.
That's one way of looking at consciousness.
The other way of looking at consciousness is to think of it as what we experience.
So, now we are awake.
We're not in sleep anymore.
right now, is the moment of our experience.
what you experience is at the cost of other things you could experience.
So, consciousness in this sense is about the conscious content.
consumers are awake, that they are not in coma and they're not in deep sleep.
we can see that there is a wide spread deactivation of the brain.
the brain that show lower activation when we are losing consciousness.
study how the brain responded when people became aware of the stimulus.
So we had people look at different figures that were shown very rapidly.
And they reported whether they saw the, something.
whether they had a vague, vague experience of what they saw.
reported by they have a clear vision of what they saw.
We could see a widespread activation of the brain.
the thalamus, and the visual cortexes, all being engaged.
What this tells us is that the brain consumes a lot of energy.
It requires a lot of widespread activation to become conscious of something.
And as you can imagine, being conscious is therefore very costly.
Thinking about the size of the brain, it's about one and a half kilograms.
its small size, it consumes about 20% of the energy of the body.
That also means that the brain needs to be careful with how much energy it uses.
If it can be unconscious, if it can run on auto-pilot, it will do that.
much energy that it will require to run autopilot as soon as possible.
And it does that really well.
For example, take riding a bike, it's easy now for you to probably, to ride a bike.
you because you had to learn every single thread on the pedal.
you to start thinking about where you're treading and how you're balancing.
So, the autopilots in your mind are really there for a purpose.
your powers to think about other things that are more important.
you can see that consciousness is there for a purpose.
It's there for dealing with flexible, challenging situations.
While the unconscious mind is very good for things that don't require that.
They can run on autopilot, such as driving a car, or riding a back.
myself tested whether brand preference could affect people's conscious threshold.
dislike than things that you are ignorant about in the every day as well.
but it's really much affected by our preference for brands.
It also shows that brands can actually imbue value to people.
decreases the likelihood that they will be seen in the environment.
unconsciousness is that if everything was conscious.
And, if we wanted to study consumer behavior we could just ask people.
The problem is that a lot of things that we do as consumers is unconscious.
This means that we need a new set of tools to understand the unconscious mind.
Next time we will talk about sensory neuromarketing.
Which is about the senses and how the senses are merging.
But, also affecting our experience as consumers.
Until next time, I look forward to see you then.