What steps does the brain go through when deciding whether or not to download a mobile app?

What is it about?

We used fMRI to scan participants brains while they made decisions about whether or not to download several apps. We find two things that a quite interesting. The first is that the overwhelming amount of processing is done in the visual areas and the second is that the amygdala plays an important role in decision whether or not to download. This suggests that the look and feel of the app are very important, maybe even more important than the functionality or purpose of the app.

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Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Why is it important?

It helps researchers, app developers and platforms understand how people go about choosing the apps they download. It also examines how different regions of the brain become activated over time to generate a decision, which is different that the way most papers look at everything that happened, rather than the order in which it happened. Thus, we hope to stimulate more interest in the dynamics of brain activation during a decision making task.