Cognitive sciences and technologies: from neuron to cognition

Going deeper into investigation the role of vmPFC in brand perception, it is worth to focus on orbitofrontal cortex. We have already discussed in the literature review willingness to pay (WTP) as a method which can provide an insight to the attractiveness of the product for the consumer and in a way an effectiveness of marketing campaigns. In the study of Plassmann and colleagues (2007), researchers studied neuronal mechanisms of WTP by investigating how much money participants are able to pay for foods while being hungry. They conducted an MRI study with 19 participants who were given real money and asked to play a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak auction game with 100 trails. The optimal strategy of the game implied bidding exactly the amount of money they are willing to pay for particular product in real life. The variety of food was pre-selected in the pilot study and was presented to the participants by high resolution pictures. Thus, researchers got the WTP measures for every item at the time of decision making and compared it after with the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) activity measured by fMRI. The behavioral results showed the average WTP equals to 1.4$ what is higher than 0$ meaning that items seemed rewarding for participants. The neuroimaging results showed that medial OFC, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) were activated while making the bid. Thus, researchers provided evidence that these areas might encode for WTP. In our research besides OFC we also got the activation in ACC that might reveal even more similarities between our studies. Our experimental manipulation can be associated with the WTP research. In every trial participant indirectly and may be without paying much attention made a decision whether he/she would be willing to pay this particular amount of money for particular good (iPhone). However, Plassmann and colleagues (2007) at the same study checked for some limitations (they tried to exclude areas that are active during economic choice, but that do not correlate with WTP) and concluded that only OFC has provided reliable evidence in its role in encoding the WTP processes.

The significant role of OFC was also found by other researches in the experiments related to encoding values and expecting rewards. For example, several monkey studies revealed activation in OFC while solving binary choice task what have grounds to suggest that OFC encodes the value of the available actions (Wallis and Miller, 2003; Padoa-Schioppa and Assad, 2006). Also, a number of stimulus-outcome learning studies that, however, did not require decision from the participant, have shown that medial OFC maintains a representation of the expected reward associated with particular cues (Rolls, 1996; Schoenbaum et al., 1998; Tremblay and Schultz, 1999; Roesch and Olson, 2004). Interestingly, similar activation in the OFC has been observed when subjects anticipate a pleasant taste (O'Doherty et al., 2002), look at pretty faces (Aharon I. et al. 2001), hear pleasant music (Zatorre et al., 2007), receive money (Knutson et al., 2001; O'Doherty et al., 2001) and experience a social reward (Izuma et al., 2008; Rilling et al., 2002). There was another interesting study of O'Doherty and Plassmann (2008) where the participants were proposed to drink and evaluate some wine. The brain activity in OFC became higher when the participants were told that the wine is expensive rather than cheap. The activation also correlated with actual preferences for the wine among participants, although almost all bottles cost the same price. These results suggest that the instantaneous experience of pleasure from a product -- that is, experienced utility -- is influenced by pricing, and that this effect may be mediated by the medial OFC (Plassmann et al., 2007).

Conclusion

We can conclude that in our MEG experiment we successfully reproduced the observations made in previous neuromarketing and semantic N400 studies (Lau et al., 2008; Wang, 2012; Halgren, 2002). Incongruencies in semantic and marketing expressions evoked larger brain activity as compared with the congruent which is manifested in the M400 incogruent-minus-congruent difference response. However, we found difference of spatiotemporal dynamics of processing incongruent information between neuropricing and semantic conditions. While the semantic incongruency evoked M400 in the window of 400-500 ms, the product-price association evoked the M400 response 100 ms earlier. Of note that the responses to anomalous ending in the semantic condition were mediated by the well-established cortical network of semantic processes including lIFG, STG, and MTG. Thus, our MEG finding stay in good agreement with the previous studies of semantic processing. In the neuropricing condition, however, the incongruent product-price associations evoked activity in the OFC, ACC, as well as rIFG regions, involved in the decision making, valuation, and choice preferences, not semantic network.

From our results, one can draw the conclusion that other mechanisms than semantic stimulus processing are the basis for activity that reflects the processing of marketing incentives. However, although earlier neuromarketing studies provided some insights why vmPFC and, in particular, OFC and ACC appeared to be involved in brand processing tasks their actual functions in marketing associations processing still need to be further investigated.

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