The EmSense headband.
It’s not about ATMs, but this was too cool to ignore:
Using a product from the neuroscience firm EmSense, the retail research company TNS Magasin is measuring brain activity of shoppers in real retail environments, with one test completed in Foot Locker.
Before people get too weirded out about privacy invasion, we should point out that this is a test-marketing device, worn by shoppers who know what the scanner is doing:
The EmSense product is a band worn around the shopper’s forehead that scans the pre-frontal cortex.
TNS Magasin is really excited about the prospects:
At last we are able to gain insight into responses to the visual stimuli that the shopper actually looks at, as well as pre-frontal cortex responses. This enables us to gauge the relative roles of emotion and cognition at each and every stage of the shopping journey to understand, literally, what is going on in shoppers’ minds.
That almost certainly overstates the case by quite a lot. Decades of brain research have demonstrated that while we can observe what part of the brain is active during a given activity, it’s much harder to deduce what it’s actually doing, and thus what the activity means. This may give some broad insight into purchasing decisions — like whether a given purchase was a reasoned or emotional decision — but it’s a far, far cry from reading minds.
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