Eye-tracking recordings and psychophysiological reactions

In the last years neuroscience has brought up many discoveries about the brain to an unprecedented level. Nowadays the tools that can study consumers’ behaviour might take advantage of neuroscientific techniques (Knutson et al., 2005 and 2007). Nevertheless, the possibility to take advantage of some neuroscientific approaches in social sciences like marketing is not evident yet. In psychology and physiology researchers are rapidly applying neuroscientific techniques in order to carry on their researches and to improve their understanding of human cognition. In sociology, some researchers that explored how culture might affect the perception and interpretation of affective stimuli already showed very interesting results by mean of biological evidences (Scherer et al., 2009; Scherer 1997). However, social sciences like marketing did not integrated neuroimaging as a new tool or method to make more comprehensive its studies. On one side, economics has started to introduce neuroimaging in its researches, leading to the creation of a new scientific discipline called “neuroeconomics” (e.g. Braeutigam, 2005; Kenning and Plassmann, 2005; Rustichini, 2005). On the other side, in the marketing field the possibility to take advantage of neuroscientific approach and biological evidences is still far away to be accomplished, despite both fields of research share many common interests about communication, decision making,human behaviour, personality and cultural issues. Some difficulties in applying neuroscientific approaches to marketing might rely on ethical issues, since studying human behaviour by means of neuroimaging might lead to the risk of manipulation. However, despite the common belief on the evil nature of marketing, its chief goal is to help match products with people (Ariely, 2010). On one side marketing guides the design of presentation of products in such a way that they might become more compatible with consumers preferences. On the other side, marketing should facilitate the choice process of consumers, according to their personality and cultural profiles. For both issues, communication strategies and advertising have an important role. However, aside the traditional techniques like focus groups and surveys, aimed to increase the probability of success about the presentation of new products, nowadays it does not exist a shared procedure or technique to objectively and quantitatively evaluate the impact of communication and advertising, to assess whether they are engaging or not or in what extent they elicit a level of engagement in terms of biological patterns reflecting a specific experience marked by attention and emotions. The final goal of this research branch is to study the communication efficacy applying evidence-based techniques. In order to fill this lack of integrations between marketing and neuroscience and to add empirical data in this field, we carried on an exploratory study where we exposed a group of students to two advertising spots while their psychophysiological and eye-tracking measures were monitored. In this paper we present some preliminary univariate analyses reported in the results section, and we will refer to the scientific framework of the Theory of Flow and to the Valence-Arousal Model of affective states in order to discuss and interpret the results. We will try to answer to the following first Research Questions: 1) is the experience of watching a spot associated with a specific psychophysiological state? The aim is to explore the possibility to use psychophysiological measures that identify the specific pattern of users’ affective state while experiencing the vision of advertising spots. In particular, we aim to explore the following second Research Question: 2) is the psychophysiological state of people watching the preferred spots (amongst two) characterized by a specific pattern?