Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson

Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson
  • Executive Director, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative
  • Senior Fellow, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative

Contact Information

  • office Address:

    Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, Room 106, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Overview

Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson is the executive director and senior fellow of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on vision and visual behavior. Her work spans physiological approaches in the retina and early visual cortex to using eye tracking to investigate how human observers look and navigate through the world, how these processes unfold over time and with experience, and the role of social cognition and decision making in these processes. As an expert on color vision, she collaborated with Lenovo to develop computer and tablet screens with features that provide a more personalized color experience. She has worked with US military special operations and the FBI Hostage Rescue Team to improve their visual training and assessments.

Before joining Wharton, Zab was an assistant research professor of neurobiology at Duke University’s School of Medicine, where she also established the Duke Institute of Brain Sciences. She received her PhD in neural science at New York University and an AB in psychobiology from Mount Holyoke College. She is passionate about how neuroscience can impact and improve many aspects of how we make choices, lead organizations, and live our lives. Her research and practice strive to push applications of neuroscience outside of the traditional laboratory in order to find new solutions for real world challenges that impact individuals, business, and society.

She is the co-author of Visual Marketing: A Practical Guide to the Science of Branding and Retailing with Barbara E. Kahn, published by Routledge, which is based on a class she co-developed and co-instructs at the Wharton School.

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Research

  • Barbara E. Kahn and Elizabeth Johnson, Visual Marketing: A Practical Guide to the Science of Branding & Retailing (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2025)

  • Simone D'Ambrogio, Noah Werksman, Michael Platt, Elizabeth Johnson (2023), How Celebrity Status and Gaze Direction in Ads Drive Visual Attention to Shape Consumer Decisions, Psychology & Marketing, 40 (4), pp. 723-734.

    Abstract: Marketers have long used celebrity endorsement to help viewers build strong brand-product associations. Celebrity endorsements increase brand awareness and recall, but how celebrity endorsements shape the decision process remains unclear. A wealth of research indicates that people tend to follow someone else's gaze, yet its effects in advertisements have been largely unexplored. We recruited 77 participants to investigate the effect of celebrities and gaze-cueing in advertisements on both gaze behavior and binary choices. We combined computational modeling with eye-tracking and pupillometry to identify which internal components of processing are affected by celebrity endorsement. We found that gaze-cueing and celebrity endorsement influence gaze allocation and option selection. Further, results from computational modeling, eye-tracking, and pupillometry revealed that the effect of celebrity endorsement on decisions can be explained as an offset in the starting point of an evidence accumulation process as well as changes in the rate of accumulation, thereby biasing choice.

Teaching

All Courses

  • BDS5991 - Independent Study

    The Independent Study is only open to MBDS students.

  • COGS3999 - Independent Study

    Departmental permission required

  • MKTG2390 - Visual Marketing

    As consumers, we are constantly exposed to advertisements and experience visual messages from product packages in stores, retail displays, and products already owned. In essence, visual marketing collateral is omnipresent and is an essential part of corporate visual identity, strategy, branding, and communication. Some of this falls to creative graphic design, but advertising, design, and marketing can also be significantly enhanced by knowledge of how visual information and its presentation context can be optimized to deliver desirable and advantageous messages and experiences. This course will emphasize how to measure, interpret, and optimize visual marketing. This course will use lectures, discussions, exercises and a group project, to help students understand the underlying processes that influence our visual perception and visual cognition. Students will learn about the theoretical processes and models that influence, attention and visual fluency. Students will also be exposed to eye-tracking instruments that help measure eye movement. Finally, we will explore how visual stimuli can influence consumer memory, persuasion, and choice. We will examine practical applications in marketing, advertising, packaging, retail, and design contexts.

  • MKTG3540 - Special Topics

    Course titles and descriptions for Special Topics courses can be found in Path@Penn for the term in which they are offered. See "SECTION DETAILS" in Path@Penn for the course description and use the Syllabi@Wharton app to see the course syllabus.

  • MKTG7390 - Visual Marketing

    As consumers, we are constantly exposed to advertisements and experience visual messages from product packages in stores, retail displays, and products already owned. In essence, visual marketing collateral is omnipresent and is an essential part of corporate visual identity, strategy, branding, and communication. Some of this falls to creative graphic design, but advertising, design, and marketing can also be significantly enhanced by knowledge of how visual information and its presentation context can be optimized to deliver desirable and advantageous messages and experiences. This course will emphasize how to measure, interpret, and optimize visual marketing. This course will use lectures, discussions, exercises and a group project, to help students understand the underlying processes that influence our visual perception and visual cognition. Students will learn about the theoretical processes and models that influence, attention and visual fluency. Students will also be exposed to eye-tracking instruments that help measure eye movement. Finally, we will explore how visual stimuli can influence consumer memory, persuasion, and choice. We will examine practical applications in marketing, advertising, packaging, retail, and design contexts.

  • MKTG8990 - Independent Study

    A student contemplating an independent study project must first find a faculty member who agrees to supervise and approve the student's written proposal as an independent study (MKTG 899). If a student wishes the proposed work to be used to meet the ASP requirement, he/she should then submit the approved proposal to the MBA adviser who will determine if it is an appropriate substitute. Such substitutions will only be approved prior to the beginning of the semester.

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Barbara E. Kahn and Elizabeth Johnson, Visual Marketing: A Practical Guide to the Science of Branding & Retailing (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2025)
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A person in a hooded jacket stands in the middle of a brightly lit urban area, surrounded by large, colorful billboards at night.Neuroscience and Marketing Meet in the Classroom

The Visual Marketing course is so popular at Penn that there isn’t enough space for all the students who sign up to take it each spring. “We get more demand for the class than we have seats,” said Wharton Marketing Professor Barbara Kahn, who teaches the course with Elizabeth “Zab”…

Wharton Stories - 06/07/2022
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