We believe that this work represents a significant step forward for the field of #consumerneuroscience by confirming the value of EEG-derived metrics in predicting marketing-relevant outcome measures.

In addition, we provide initial evidence that mental processes associated with understanding and comprehension may underlie this gamma response, suggesting that trailers with a clear narrative evoke a stronger gamma response which in turn predicts commercial success of the movie.

Across datasets, only EEG gamma activity was predictive of box office revenue, above and beyond characteristics of the movie and self-reported liking. Importantly, the predictive power of gamma generalizes to new movies: out-of-sample predictions improve significantly with gamma as a predictor.

In our new work we perform a systematic analysis of five independent datasets, testing all EEG metrics that have been associated with commercial success and included non-neural metrics that are known to affect commercial success of movies (e.g. genre, production budget, star power, etc.).

This was the first study revealing the potential of #EEG for what is called #neuroforecasting. Since then, there have been several papers reporting similar findings; however, the exact metrics that were found to be predictive differed across these studies.

This research is a follow-up of our 2015 paper in which we found that a specific component of the #EEG (gamma activity), as evoked in a small sample of participants watching movie trailers, was associated with how successful those movies would be at the box office.