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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 Mar 12.
Published in final edited form as: J Finance. 2014 Mar 17;69(2):907–946. doi: 10.1111/jofi.12126

Figure 1. Sample screens from a typical trial in the fMRI experiment.

Figure 1

For trials 10–108, subjects saw the price update screen for two seconds, followed by the trading screen for which they had up to three seconds to enter a decision (a blank screen was displayed in between in order to temporally separate neural activity associated with decision-making.) Because the blank screen is displayed for a random amount of time (uniformly distributed between 1 and 3 seconds), the average length of a trial, consisting of the three screens, is 7 seconds. The screens shown below are for a trial in which the subject owns a unit of both stocks A and B. If the subject had not owned stock A at the price update screen, the purchase price would not be displayed. If the subject had not owned stock B at the trading screen, he would have had the opportunity to buy stock B. The screens were displayed while subjects were inside the fMRI scanner, and decisions were entered with a handheld device. For trials 1–9, subjects only saw the price update screen and the blank screen, which allowed them to accumulate information about the price changes before they were asked to make a decision starting on trial 10.