I arrived at Simulmedia from the world of medical research. Before I started analyzing set-top box data to understand how people watch television and audiences’ responses to promotion, I modeled the flows of cerebral fluids to better understand how people responded to antipsychotic treatments.
I knew that I would tap into my statistical expertise at Simulmedia, but I didn’t anticipate that neuroscience would also prove applicable.
While our analyses rely on set-top box data, we are willing to search outside the realm of TV, even into an area like neuroscience, to inform our understanding of the interaction between an audience and the viewing content consumed. It turns out that both set-top box data and brain scans can give us information about viewers’ engagement with a television program or promotion.
We are not going to join the ranks of neuromarketers any time soon. Collecting EEG signals and brain scan measurements every time someone watches TV is prohibitively expensive. However, we might be able to use the relevant ideas to come up with measurable markers of attentiveness or viewing modality. We can then use these concepts in our analysis of the set-top box datasets.
A panel of experts on the brain and cinema gathered last month at the New York Academy of Sciences to draw an interdisciplinary connection between film and neuroscience. The conference raised two questions—can we use movies as a tool to learn something about the brain, and can we learn something about films from neuroscience? The researchers presented some of their findings from the studies in which participants watch a movie while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan.
Different cinematic devices activate different structures in the brain. For example, a close-up shot of an actor’s face tends to activate a part of our brain called the Fusiform Face Area (FFA). A long aerial shot lights up our Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA). Shots of an action being performed engage the mirror neurons in our brains’ Postcentral Sulcus.
On the other hand, the enclosed is more open-ended, and would trigger a less uniform pattern of brain activity across viewers. Such response is also less predictable from the point of view of ratings. We will continue working on teasing out more implications for our analysis.