Event-related potentials technique using in affective fashion design

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to utilize the spontaneous brain potentials as an index to quantifying the consumers’ inner emotions, and propose an objective method to obtain the clothing recognitions of consumers by only monitoring brain activities. Design/methodology/approach – Different styles of men’s casual jacket were studied as a case. The research included four phases: first, stimuli samples were constructed by clustering algorithm. Second, self-report for the perception of stimuli samples were recorded by self-assessment manikin. Third, real-time brain potentials while viewing stimuli samples were recorded and analyzed. Finally, the output data were compared with the classical research achievements of visual evoked emotional ERPs to examine the effectiveness. Findings – The results indicated significant difference in main effect of different emotional categories which was identified a corresponding relationship between the emotional trigger and the emotional reaction, of which the early components were the typical components that provided the major physiology characteristics for emotional fashion design. The middle components could be used as the assist reference indexes. The negative stimuli were first noticed because its shorter processing times and larger amplitudes. The comparison confirmed that the proposed method was capable of quantifying cognitive activities of consumers by only monitoring brain activities and then transferred the analyzed data to the design references. Originality/value – The results quantifying the qualities of consumers’ emotional preference for men’ casual jackets based on the neural mechanism of human brain, which could eliminate the systematic biases associated with the uses of words and semantic comprehension in self-report methods. The proposed method may help to enrich and complete the sentimental fashion design for the cognitive experience of consumer oriented. Moreover, it also could be beneficial to optimize design process and improve efficiency and core competitiveness for clothing producers.