But the real surprise came during scans when the subjects viewed the partners they disliked being shocked.
Although subjects in this study viewed the films in randomized orders the subjects from Study 1 always performed the rating tasks first on relatively empty roads.
In the other condition subjects viewed the same films in the same manner but described only the risks and potential risks in each section of film.
All subjects viewed all 24 films in both phases of the experiment.
The experiment had subjects view images of different objects, including faces (as a control group), body parts, animals, parts of the face and intimate objects.
With between 72% and 90% accuracy where chance would achieve 0.8%, fMRI techniques can decide which of a set of known images the subject is viewing.
Pharaohs' subjects viewed the pharaoh as a living god, the god Horus.
Then subjects viewed another 120 novel target images, and information from the earlier scans is used reconstruct them.
The position of the viewer can strongly influence the aesthetics of an image, even if the subject is entirely imaginary and viewed "within the mind's eye".
In these experiments, subjects often viewed stimuli that could be connected to form a coherent perception of a line, like a simplified connect the dots puzzle.