JUDGEMENT , DECISIONS: MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
People make immediate
judgments about images they are shown, which could impact on their decisions,
even before their brains have had time to consciously process the information,
a study of brainwaves led by The University Of Melbourne has found.
Published in PLOS
ONE, the study is the first in the world to show that it is possible to
predict abstract judgments from brain waves, even though people were not
conscious of making such judgments. The study also increases our understanding
of impulsive behaviors and how to regulate it.
It found that
researchers could predict from participants' brain activity how exciting they
found a particular image to be, and whether a particular image made them think
more about the future or the present. This is true even though the brain
activity was recorded before participants knew they were going to be asked to
make these judgments.
Lead authors Dr Stefan
Bode from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences and Dr Carsten
Murawski from the University of Melbourne Department of Finance said these
findings illustrated there was more information encoded in brain activity than
previously assumed.
"We have found
that brain activity when looking at images can encode judgments such as time
reference, even when the viewer is not aware of making such judgments.
Moreover, our results suggest that certain images can prompt a person to think
about the present or the future," they said.
The authors said the
results contributed to our understanding of impulsive behaviors, especially
where those behaviors were caused by 'prompts' in the world around us.
"For instance,
consider someone trying to quit gambling who sees a gambling advertisement on
TV. Our results suggest that even if this person is trying to ignore the ad,
their brain may be unconsciously processing it and making it more likely that
they will relapse," he said.
The researchers used
electroencephalography technology (EEG) to measure the electrical activity of
people's brains while they looked at different pictures. The pictures displayed
images of food, social scenes or status symbols like cars and money.
After the EEG,
researchers showed participants the same pictures again and asked questions
about each image, such as how exciting they thought the image was or how strongly
the image made them think of either the present or the future.
A statistical
'decoding' technique was then used to predict the judgments participants made
about each of the pictures from the EEG brain activity that was recorded.
Co-author Daniel Bennett
said just as certain prompts might cause impulsive behavior, images could be
used to prompt people to be more patient by regulating impulse control.
"Our results
suggest that prompting people with images related to the future might cause
processing outside awareness that could make it easier to think about the
future. In theory, this could make people less impulsive and more likely to
make healthy long-term decisions. These are hypotheses we will try to test in
the future," he said. The research was done in collaboration with the
University of Cologne, Germany.
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