Brain activity forecasts video engagement in an internet attention market

Abstract

The growth of the internet has spawned new “attention markets,” in which people devote increasing amounts of time to consuming online content, but the neurobehavioral mechanisms that drive engagement in these markets have yet to be elucidated. We used functional MRI (FMRI) to examine whether individuals’ neural responses to videos could predict their choices to start and stop watching videos as well as whether group brain activity could forecast aggregate video view frequency and duration out of sample on the internet (i.e., onyoutube.com). Brain activity during video onset predicted individual choice in several regions (i.e., increased activity in the nucleus accumbens [NAcc] and medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC] as well as decreased activity in the anterior insula [AIns]). Group activity during video onset in only a subset of these regions, however, forecasted both aggregate view frequency and duration (i.e., increased NAcc and decreased AIns)—and did so above and beyond conventional measures. These findings extend neuroforecasting theory and tools by revealing that activity in brain regions implicated in anticipatory affect at the onset of video viewing (but not initial choice) can forecast time allocation out of sample in an internet attention market.

Measuring dlPFC Signals to Predict the Success of Merchandising Elements at the Point-of-Sale – A fNIRS Approach

“…Whereas previous research work mainly focused on the reward association system and its associated subcortical brain regions to predict sales, utilising stationary neuroscientific methods (e.g., Berns and Moore, 2012;Venkatraman et al, 2015;Tong et al, 2020), the research findings of the current study not only suggest that the shoppers' reward associations seem to be predictive for sales at the PoS, but indicate the importance of the conflicts perceived by the shopper and the congruency between the perceived brand image and the displayed PoS merchandising elements. In other words, the research results signify that the brand 'duplo' activates expectation of rewards, which either fits with the associations triggered by the merchandising PoS element or do not fit with the brand's image perceived by shoppers, leading to either conflicting or supporting, cortical relief effects, displayed by an increase neural activity or a decreased neural activity of the dlPFC, respectively.…”

“…The application of neuropsychological methods, using neural brain activity data to forecast products and marketing campaigns success, has been indicated to offer a promising approach to gain further knowledge about the consumers' perception processes (Ariely and Berns, 2010;Berns and Moore, 2012;Falk et al, 2012Falk et al, , 2015Plassmann et al, 2015;Venkatraman et al, 2015;Daugherty et al, 2016;Karmarkar and Yoon, 2016;Kühn et al, 2016;Motoki et al, 2020;Tong et al, 2020). Plassmann et al (2007) explored, for example, how neuropsychological methods could be used to investigate brand equity as a determining factor that influences the perception and, consequently, the behaviour of consumers.…”

“…Plassmann et al (2007) explored, for example, how neuropsychological methods could be used to investigate brand equity as a determining factor that influences the perception and, consequently, the behaviour of consumers. Subsequently, multiple studies demonstrated the predictive power of neuropsychological data, displaying the capability of forecasting music and movie success or advertising elasticities of television ads (Baldo et al, 2015a;Boksem and Smidts, 2015;Venkatraman et al, 2015;Cha et al, 2019;Tong et al, 2020). Although the predictive power of neuropsychological methods has been demonstrated to outperform 'traditional' marketing methods (Venkatraman et al, 2015), neuropsychological methods and the generated neuropsychological insights are only partially adapted in practice.…”

Brain Activity Foreshadows Stock Price Dynamics

“…Despite the challenge of translating individual predictions into aggregate forecasts, recent neuroimaging work suggests that some neural predictors of individual choice might further scale to forecast aggregate choice ( Falk et al, 2012 ; Knutson and Genevsky, 2018 ). For instance, average group neural activity in laboratory samples has been used to forecast aggregate market responses to music clips ( Berns and Moore, 2012 ), advertisements ( Venkatraman et al, 2015 ), microloan appeals ( Genevsky and Knutson, 2015 ), crowdfunding proposals ( Genevsky et al, 2017 ), news summaries ( Scholz et al, 2017 ), and video clips ( Tong et al, 2020 ). In some cases, experimentally measured neural activity can even forecast aggregate choice better than stated preferences or behavioral choices.…”

The Effectiveness of Online Messages for Promoting Smoking Cessation Resources: Predicting Nationwide Campaign Effects From Neural Responses in the EX Campaign

“…Of note, the brain-based and the subjective measures also correlated positively ( r = 0.29), but again not significantly. Work in other contexts, such as predicting crowd-funding outcomes and video virality using brain data, has made a case for positive arousal as a key factor (Genevsky et al, 2017 ; Tong et al, 2020 ), but in the current dataset neither the univariate analyses, the multivariate signature, or the subjective evaluations correlated significantly with the click-through measures. One possible explanation is that the relationships would have been significant with a larger number of banner messages, which is a naturally limiting factor in campaigns that use only a small-to-moderate number of messages (here 23 banners).…”