• autism spectrum disorder
• behavioral economics
• behavioral medicine
• eye-tracking
• neuromarketing
• public health

Advertising has always been studied from a psychological or psycho-analitic perspective, according to its huge impact on costumers’ wills and desires. Recently, medical researchers have started to take it into consideration by mapping brain areas activated by advertising stimuli, thanks to fMRI or eye-tracking analysis also. This is what up to now is best known as Neuromarketing. Anyway, this mere empirical approach is obviously limited. The reason is that neuromarketing is just a restricted part of a wider field of studies known as ‘decision making’. Those cognitive biases, which so deeply influence our daily choices are well exploited and analysed by neuromarketing experts. But more, an increasing interest in such applications of neurosciences has been clearly recorded in finance, where securities or equity analysts are more and more called into question.
Therefore, we tried to give a theoretical explanation to this process by a medical perspective, studying both verbal (or expressed) and non-verbal (or unexpressed) engagement to commercial stimuli through the analysis of under-the-threshold autistic traits.
Our ultimate goal is to perform a transferable model of meta-verbal communication, which may be applied in public health management to increase people compliance towards healthier lifestyle.