Valence Perception

When grabbing a coffee mug out of a cluttered cabinet or choosing a pen to quickly sign a document, what brain processes guide your choices?

New research from Carnegie Mellon University's Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) shows that the brain's visual perception system automatically and unconsciously guides decision-making through what is known as valence perception.

Published in the journal "Frontiers in Psychology," the review hypothesizes that valence — which can be defined as the positive or negative information automatically perceived in the majority of visual information — integrates visual features and associations from experience with similar objects or features.

In other words, it’s the process that allows our brains to rapidly make choices between similar objects.

The findings offer important insights into consumer behavior in ways that traditional consumer marketing focus groups cannot address.

For example, asking individuals to react to package designs, ads or logos is simply ineffective. Instead, companies can use this type of brain science to more effectively assess how unconscious visual valence perception contributes to consumer behavior.

To transfer the research's scientific application to the online video market, the CMU research team is in the process of founding the startup company neonlabs through the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps).

Michael J. Tarr, the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and co-director of the CNBC, said that the NSF I-Corps program has been instrumental in helping the neonlabs' team take this basic idea and teaching them how to turn it into a viable company.

"The I-Corps program gave us unprecedented access to highly successful, experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who provided incredibly valuable feedback throughout the development process," he said.

NSF established I-Corps for the sole purpose of assessing the readiness of transitioning new scientific opportunities into valuable products through a public-private partnership.

A $50,000, six-month grant to investigate how understanding valence perception could be used to make better consumer marketing decisions was awarded to the CMU team of Tarr; Sophie Lebrecht, a CNBC and Tepper School of Business postdoctoral fellow; Babs Carryer, an embedded entrepreneur at CMU's Project Olympus; and Thomas Kubilius, president of Pittsburgh-based Bright Innovation and adjunct professor of design at CMU.

They are launching neonlabs to apply their model of visual preference to increase click rates on online videos, by identifying the most visually appealing thumbnail from a stream of video.

"Everything you see, you automatically dislike or like, prefer or don't prefer, in part, because of valence perception," said Lebrecht, lead author of the study and the entrepreneurial lead for the I-Corps grant. "Valence links what we see in the world to how we make decisions."

Lebrecht continued, "Talking with companies such as YouTube and Hulu, we realized that they are looking for ways to keep users on their sites longer by clicking to watch more videos. Thumbnails are a huge problem for any online video publisher, and our research fits perfectly with this problem. Our approach streamlines the process and chooses the screenshot that is the most visually appealing based on science, which will in the end result in more user clicks."

CMU is well known for its entrepreneurial culture. The university's Greenlighting Startups initiative is uniquely designed to support new business creation at CMU.

"CMU has been an amazing place to build neonlabs," Lebrecht said. "There's a great intellectual community and facilities here as well as people unbelievably experienced in tech transfer and startups who have been so incredibly generous with their time."

Greenlighting Startups is uniquely designed to support CMU's culture of entrepreneurship and new business creation. Learn more »

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