Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1470662
This article is part of the Research Topic EEG Rhythms: Decoding the Evolutionary Enigma of Alpha Rhythms in Vertebrates View all 6 articles

Neural correlates of the non-optimal price: an MEG/EEG study

Provisionally accepted
Aleksey Gorin Aleksey Gorin 1Elizaveta Kuznetsova Elizaveta Kuznetsova 2Andrew Kislov Andrew Kislov 1*Egor Levchenko Egor Levchenko 1Vasily Klucharev Vasily Klucharev 1Victoria Moiseeva Victoria Moiseeva 1Anna Yurchenko Anna Yurchenko 3Alexander Luzhin Alexander Luzhin 4Natalia Galkina Natalia Galkina 4Anna N Shestakova Anna N Shestakova 1
  • 1 National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
  • 2 Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Uusimaa, Finland
  • 3 Center for Language and Brain, Faculty of Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Moscow Oblast, Russia
  • 4 NeuroTrend Company, Zvenigorodskaya street, 12, 121433, Moscow, Russia, Moscow, Russia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Setting an optimal price is essential for positioning products on the market, while setting a "non-optimal price" (a price perceived as significantly lower or higher than the product's real market value), impacts consumer decision-making and business outcomes. We conducted two electroencephalography (EEG) studies and one magnetoencephalography (MEG) study to investigate brain mechanisms underlying the perception of prices as too low or too high during a price judgement task. In each trial, participants were exposed to a mobile phone image (iPhone, Nokia or Xiaomi) followed by a price, and instructed to judge whether the price was high or low based on a target word ('cheap' or 'expensive'). In both EEG experiments, we found a strong N400-like response to the incongruent target words following prices that substantially differed from the real market value of the mobile phone. The MEG experiment extended these findings by localising the brain source of the price-related, M400-like response, the magnetic counterpart to the N400 component, in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) implicated in value-based and reward-based learning, respectively. Our results demonstrate that both the brain sources and the timing of the pricerelated M400 response differed from those of the standard M400 evoked by semantically incongruent words. Overall, our results suggest that the N400-like response can serve as a neural marker of price-product incongruity, with potential applications in consumer research.

    Keywords: EEG, MEG, N400, neuromarketing, neuroeconomics, consumer neuroscience, Pricing

    Received: 30 Jul 2024; Accepted: 06 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Gorin, Kuznetsova, Kislov, Levchenko, Klucharev, Moiseeva, Yurchenko, Luzhin, Galkina and Shestakova. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Andrew Kislov, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.