Patterns of cortical activity during the observation of Public Service Announcements and commercial advertisings.

Background: In the present research we were interested to study the cerebral activity of a group of healthy subjects during the observation a documentary intermingled by a series of TV advertisements. In particular, we desired to examine whether Public Service Announcements (PSAs) are able to elicit a different pattern of activity, when compared with a different class of commercials, and correlate it with the memorization of the showed stimuli, as resulted from a following subject's verbal interview.

Methods: We recorded the EEG signals from a group of 15 healthy subjects and applied the High Resolution EEG techniques in order to estimate and map their Power Spectral Density (PSD) on a realistic cortical model.