Abstract

Rapid growth in structural and functional brain research has led to increasing ethical discussion of what to do about incidental findings within the brains of healthy neuroimaging research participants that have potential health importance, but which are beyond the original aims of the study. This dilemma has been widely debated with respect to general neuroimaging research but has attracted little attention in the context of neuromarketing studies. In this paper, I argue that neuromarketing researchers owe participants the same ethical obligations as other neuroimaging researchers. The financial resources available to neuromarketing firms and the social value of neuromarketing studies should command greater attention to the elucidation and management of incidental findings. However, this needs to be balanced against finite resources available within most public health systems.