April 2010

While many forms of advertising employ sound as part of their sensory mix, one intriguing approach provides a way to surprise listeners with what seems to be a personal auditory experience. One fascinating example is the billboard…

We'd all like to think better, but few of us have the time or desire to, say, spend years in a Tibetan monastery learning to meditate. Past studies have shown that such extended training can indeed improve cognitive functioning.…

One of my all-time most popular posts is Child Labor: Put That Baby to Work!, which showed how orienting a baby picture so that the baby was looking toward the headline of an ad caused people to spend more time reading that headline.…

A couple of new headsets that can be used for neuromarketing studies won't win any fashion awards, but offer the potential to gauge consumer reactions in relatively normal situations. The first is from Hitachi, and in contrast to the…

Many of the decisions we make are guided by some kind of reward. Do I go through the McDonalds drive-thru window and get a burger and fries that will light my brain up like a Christmas tree, or do I delay eating until my planned meal-time…

Popular psychology simplifies the different functions of our brain hemispheres by using "left brain" to indicate analytical thinking and "right brain" to mean creativity and emotion. That may be a bit of an oversimplification, but it's…

In yet another indication that human olfactory responses can completely bypass our conscious thought process, a study at Florida State University has shown that the natural scent of an ovulating woman can boost the testosterone levels of…

Browse through the magazines at the supermarket checkout line, and you'll find that almost every one oriented to a female audience has some kind of a weight loss plan on the cover. Male-oriented magazines, meanwhile, are more likely to…

Visa "Trip for Life" TV Spot from VisaGoWorld on Vimeo. Last week, neuromarketing firm Neurofocus released summary results of a study that compared the performance of the same ad when run on television and on two Internet websites,…

Neuromarketing readers know I sometimes venture into the non-marketing area of brain fitness, and I couldn't resist passing along this bit of research on cell phone use. For years, we've been hearing alarming claims that cell phone use…