An Event-related-potential Study Of Brand Processing In A Categorization Task

Brand recognition is an important and complex cognitive processing in social life. Previous research had used reaction-time technique to investigate the mechanism of brand recognition, but there were just a few studies on neural mechanism of brand recognition。Recent neuroimaging research used FMRI technique suggests that brand processing mainly recruits the prefrontal cortex cognitive brain areas. However, because of the temporal limitation of this technique, the time course of brand processing remains unresolved. This study investigated into the ERP component via the brand-object lexical decision tasks in order to explore the neurophysiologic differences in the early processing between brand and other categories (natural and artifactual object). The stimuli consisted of 160 words in two-character Chinese phrase. Forty words were brand names, and sixty words were natural objects. The rest were for artifactual objects. Twelve undergraduate students participated in the experiment, who were asked to respond as quickly as possible with the left button of mouse when they saw brand name, and don't press the button of mouse when object name occurring.The major findings of the present study were: (1) Participants interacted significantly with brand recognition in the early time. (2)There existed a significant effect of types of stimuli. For example, the N170 amplitude elicited by words from brand categories was higher than that elicited by natural and artifactual categories, and the N170 latency elicited by words from brand categories was shorter than by object categories. (3)The later centro-parietal LPC (350–550 ms) showed a large enhancement for the brand name.The findings of this study suggest that human being has processing dominance in Brand recognition at the early stage, and the N170 amplitude in brand recognition is greater than in other objects recognition. N170 is the early component in brand recognition and maybe related with human survival in the society。Processing at later stages (represented by LPC) that are involved in the actual categorical decision-making process necessary to perform the task.