⏳ Duration
- 2 months
👨🏽🔬 Role
- Research Intern
🛠️ Tools Used
- iMotions Eye-Tracker
- PsychoPy
Project Overview
Worked on an interesting problem at the intersection of Neuroscience and Marketing at Platt Labs under the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative.
- The experiment aimed to study loss aversion and choice overloading from financial decision-making perspective in consumers using eye-tracking and pupillometry.
- I was involved in designing the experiment, conducting it and collecting eye-gaze data of the participants.
- The data was then analysed by the research team and an in-depth study was published.
What is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing is a developing field where researchers study consumers' brain's neurological responses to product advertising. Lately, it has also been used in product design and UX research.
The Loss Aversion Research Study
Loss aversion is a cognitive bias, which explains why we feel the pain of loss twice as intensively as the equivalent pleasure of gain. Simply put, the unhappiness of losing $10 is greater than the happiness of finding $10.
Aim of the study
- Despite the ubiquity of loss aversion, the underlying neurological mechanisms remain unresolved and hotly debated.
- The study aimed to develop a physiologically grounded framework for the decision process leading to lose aversion in humans.
Procedure
- Participants were given gambling tasks to decide whether to accept or reject gambles of equal chance of winning and losing money on a computer.
- The computer screen had an eye-tracker to collect the eye gaze data of the participants during their decision process.
- Each trial had a gamble with the amounts of potential gain and loss displayed in two boxes positioned at the left and right to the fixation.
- Participants were given unlimited time to make the decision by pressing one of two keys in their keyboard.
- At the start of the experiment, participants received an endowment of $10 in cash. They were told that at the end of the experiment a random gamble would be chosen and a coin toss will decide whether they have won the gamble or not.
Results
- Participants in our study showed a typical pattern of loss aversion in their choices and response times.
- Despite our symmetric design of gains and losses across gambles, overall, participants were less likely to accept than reject gambles and were slower to accept than rejecting gambles.
- They also demanded a premium amount to be indifferent to accepting or rejecting gambles.
- They took the longest time to make decisions for gambles entailing such a premium.
My Responsibilites
- Assisted in designing behavioral paradigms and conducting the experiment on loss aversion.
- Generated the experiment stimuli sets using Python and installed the experiment setup using iMotions.
- Assisted research scholars in data collection using eye-tracking techniques to analyze eye-gaze data.
- Explored technologies like OpenBCI, Pupil Labs eye-trackers & formulated a choice overloading study.
My Initiatives
- Volunteered to participate in a research study for NeuroFlow - behavioural health ecosystem startup.
- Assisted a new intern to settle in and acquainted him with lab practices by involving him in my projects.
- Attended ‘Intro to Marketing’ summer classes at Wharton Business School for free (My professor's friend was conducting those classes 😉)
Key Takeaways
- Learnt in-depth about some of our human biases like loss aversion and choice overloading.
- Experienced working together with a multicultural team having diverse skill sets.
- Explored a new country alone by travelling to new cities - Washington DC, New York.
