Abstract
Cognitive neuroscience and its applied developments have revolutionized marketing. With advances in neuroscientific techniques, marketing has needed to refocus toward understanding issues like the area of the brain that should be stimulated to transform the consumer’s intention to purchase into a real decision, how information is processed when making a decision, and how personality traits affect the purchase decision. Neuroscience has opened the door to the consumer’s brain. For many years, scientists have investigated the role of subliminal messages in marketing, with their findings generating a significant controversy. Many have shown that making sound decisions based on intuition rather than conscious reasoning is more common than previously thought. In fact, many studies have shown that sound intuitive decision-making depends on the association of the subliminal messages of a given situation with the limbic brain structures formed. Scientists have concluded that the brain does not consciously need to know contextual information to learn the value of this information and make the necessary linkages to make productive decisions. In this study, we consider whether unconscious perceptual processing influences decision-making and explore the influence of aspects of personality that are related to unconscious processing, such as the degree of neuroticism, extroversion, and gender of the individual, applied to the demographic cohort Generation Z, distinguishing between whether the stimuli are verbal or pictorial. The backward masking visual paradigm has been used to assess unconscious perceptual processing. To test these processes, a set of ANOVA models and logistic regressions were run where the dependent variable is whether the people perceived the stimuli or not and the independent variables were gender, the form of the stimuli (pictorial or verbal), and the personality traits extroversion, introversion, and neuroticism. The results suggest that verbal stimuli work better than pictorial stimuli, although a possible explanation is that the pictures require modification to be more effective. In the case of verbal stimuli, gender and level of neuroticism are found to be important variables that influence unconscious perceptual decision-making processes. Specifically, a female with a high level of neuroticism shows greater permeability in its unconscious perceptual processes.
Highlights
Human beings have the potential to perceive all the external stimuli that surround them
The main areas of research throughout the 20th century have revolved around the acceptability of the method used to establish the absence of conscious perception and the method to evaluate the unconscious perception of the stimulus (Overgaard and Timmermans, 2010; Smith and McCulloch, 2012)
We explore the influence of personality traits that are related to unconscious processing, namely, the degree of neuroticism, extroversion, and introversion as well as the gender of the individual
Summary
Human beings have the potential to perceive all the external stimuli that surround them. Stimuli are processed at different levels: some by conscious perceptual experience, i.e., those we are normally aware of, and others by unconscious perceptual experience, which are received without us having the notion that they are influencing our behavior. This second type of stimulus, namely, subliminal simulation, is what we consider in this paper. Demonstrating the existence of unconscious perceptual processes through which stimuli are perceived when subjects are not aware of them has been in the minds of scientists and researchers for decades, generating much controversy. With the rise of research in neurology (Neumann and Klotz, 1994; Dehaene et al, 1998; Eimer and Schlaghecken, 1998; Abrams and Greenwald, 2000; Damian, 2001; Abrams et al, 2002; Kunde et al, 2003; Forster, 2004) and neuroscience in the 21st century (Dehaene et al, 2001; Naccache and Dehaene, 2001a,b; Devlin et al, 2004; Nakamura et al, 2005) scientists have converged on the existence of unconscious perceptual processes
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