Consumer Neuroscience Foundations

12 canonical consumer-neuroscience primitives for product, content, interface, and retention design. Each primitive is domain-agnostic and ethically bounded. Primitives 1–8 cover engagement-time neural responses (salience, arousal, bonding, narrative, regulatory orientation, social mirroring, aesthetics, interoception). Primitives 9–12 cover temporal and predictive mechanisms (memory consolidation, reward anticipation, embodied cognition, predictive processing). Primitive #10 (reward anticipation, Berridge "wanting" vs "liking") is intentionally distinct from foundations-behavioral-economics primitive #13 (reinforcement schedules / dopamine prediction-error): that skill covers schedule-of-reinforcement design; this skill covers anticipatory dopamine as a separate design lever — countdown UX, drop reveals, daily-card open, pre-purchase excitement. Primitive #12 (predictive processing & active inference) is the unifying primitive that grounds attention (#1), interoception (#8), and narrative (#4) under one prediction-error-minimization frame: the brain continuously generates predictions; violations of priors incur a prediction-error cost that must be "earned" by the design.

Ethical obligation: every primitive in this skill operates on pre-conscious or sub-deliberative neural systems. The manipulation risk is higher than for behavioral-economics nudges, because users cannot easily introspect on the mechanism. Read the Misuse Boundary subsection in each playbook before applying any technique. The test from Thaler and Sunstein: "Would you be embarrassed if the technique appeared on the front page of a newspaper?" If yes, it is exploitation, not design. The DMCC Act 2024, in force from 6 April 2025, makes online choice architecture and dark patterns directly actionable by the CMA with fines up to 10% of global annual turnover.

When to Apply

Apply consumer-neuroscience when:

• Attention/salience design — first-7-second hook, visual hierarchy, modal vs inline
• Anxiety-driven engagement loops (cosmic, dating, status apps) — needs DMCC ethical audit
• Parasocial / narrative-led conversion (creator content, branded characters)
• Daily-cadence retention with timing-sensitive triggers (consolidation windows, wake-time)
• Trust repair, reciprocity, or oxytocin-bond design in social/community products