The University of St. Joseph (USJ) will open a laboratory in Applied Neuroscience on Friday to support everything from teaching Chinese to teaching foreigners to promoting Western products in China.
Alexandre Robo, director of the institute, told Lusa that the idea of using neuroscience in the field of marketing was one of the motives for moving from Angola to the SAR of China in 2017.
Thanks to the collection of data on brain waves, heart rate, facial expressions, and gaze tracking, we can identify the reactions and emotions of different people, for example when watching an ad.
USJ is already working with Marcus Gon Salves, a Brazilian professor at Boston University Metropolitan University in the United States, to investigate sports bike advertising in China.
“One of the ideas in our lab is to be able to serve companies,” he explained, as also the director of USJ’s business administration.
The decision to set up a lab was made to “expand the concept” beyond marketing, the researchers explained.
Something that began with the stress and decision-making experience of “leading people”, measuring impacts such as risk aversion and response to time constraints, reminded me of Alexander Robo.
The next step was a research project in Brazil. Brazilian scholars explained that Instituto da Primeira Infância, based at the Federal University of Ceara and Fortaleza, has a poor family “under chronic stress.”
“We used the same equipment, such as EEG monitoring, to assess the reactions of these people when they received a relaxation session and see if anything changed,” said the director of the institute. I did.
USJ has also launched a joint project with the Federal University of Ceara and the Catholic University of Porto Catholics in Portugal to automatically interpret and classify people’s reactions using artificial intelligence.
The greatest potential of the new institute could be in the field of education, guaranteed by Alexander Robo. “It’s one of the ideas to analyze foreigners studying Chinese and see what classes create more motivation and stress,” he explained.
USJ researchers have already analyzed lessons in “traditional Chinese schools that create a lot of stress.” For example, subjects or exams that “need too much memorization”.
Alexandre Robo believes it is also possible to “generate tools to deal with lack of concentration,” that is, to help children and adolescents with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. I did.
