Shopping behavior can be swayed by a person’s spouse or companion, as their brains show correlating activity in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) researchers said yesterday.
The Ministry of Science and Technology told a news conference in Taipei that since 2012 it has successively installed functional MRI equipment at National Chengchi University, National Taiwan University (NTU) and NCKU, with NTU having a magnetoencephalography (MEG) facility for mapping brain activity.
Over the past five years, the ministry has provided funding of NT$325 million (US$10.58 million) to 151 research projects at the three universities, it added.
An NCKU team has used the equipment to study couples’ brain activity in a bid to see how shopping behavior might be influenced by their companions.
By scanning the brains of married couples, they found that an area of the brain called the temporoparietal junction becomes active when they take into account a suggestion by their partner, NCKU Department of Economics assistant professor Weng Ming-hung (翁明宏) said.
Earlier studies have found that wives spend more time considering whether to buy a certain thing than husbands do, with wives seemingly placing more emphasis on the needs of their children, NCKU Department of Psychology assistant professor Chen Der-yow (陳德祐) said.
While men and women show some differences in their shopping behavior, the anterior cingulate cortex area of the brain becomes active for both when they are dealing with interpersonal conflicts, Weng said.
MRI equipment at hospitals is often used to scan for abnormal tissue using structural neuroimaging, while functional neuroimaging can be used for a variety of research purposes, NCKU Department of Psychology chair Hsieh Shu-lan (謝淑蘭) said.
NCKU researchers have also developed an eight-minute scan to analyze the degree to which a person’s brain has aged, she said, adding that her laboratory has collected about 200 samples.
When they have a more precise grasp of human brain activity, they might be able to propose ways to postpone the aging process, she said.
They could even forecast a person’s life expectancy or their chances of having a mental disorder if they are able to expand their scope by working with hospitals, she added.
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