What Do You Want to Eat? Influence of Menu Description and Design on Consumer’s Mind: An fMRI Study

The main objective of this research was to analyse the active regions when processing dishes with a pleasant (vs. unpleasant) design and the effect of the previously read rational (vs. emotional) description when visualising the dish. The functional magnetic resonance image technique was used for the study. The results showed that participants who visualised pleasant vs. unpleasant dishes became active in several domains (e.g., attention, cognition and reward). On the other side, visualisation of unpleasant dishes activated stronger regions linked to inhibition, rejection, and related ambiguity. We found that subjects who read rational descriptions when visualising pleasant dishes activated regions related to congruence integration, while subjects who visualised emotional descriptions showed an increased neuronal response to pleasant dishes in the regions related to memory, emotion and congruence.

Application of the Kalman Filter in Functional Magnetic Resonance Image Data

The Kalman-Bucy filter was applied on the preprocessing of the functional magnetic resonance image-fMRI. Numerical simulations of hemodynamic response added Gaussian noise were performed to evaluate the performance of the filter. After the proceeding was applied in auditory real data. The Kohonen’s self-organized map was employed as tools to compare the performance of the Kalman’s filter with another type of pre-processing. The results of the application of Kalman-Bucy filter for simulated data and real auditory data showed that it can be used as a tool in the temporal filtering step in fMRI data.