College 2 Flashcards
What does the effectiveness of advertising depend on? And why?
The effectiveness of advertising depends highly on whether people remember the advertisement or not.
This is because there is often some time between being exposed to an advertisement and the actual purchase decision.
How can you make it easier to memorize something?
When you make bizarre images when you memorize something, it becomes much easier to memorize these things. And if you tie these bizarre images to a place you know well, it becomes even more easy to memorize these things. So, you make these associations that you know well, and this makes you memorize things better.
Associating things with information that already exists in your memory makes it easier to remember. This is a very effective strategy in advertisement.
In which stages of the DAGMAR model is memory important?
Memory is mostly important for going from awareness to comprehension & image.
But memory actually influences all of these stages and is therefore highly important to advertising.
Even in stages where you are unaware, memory has in influence.
What does memory do?
Memory is involved with recording, storing, and retrieving information.
Memory influences perception, encoding, and storage.
Encoding
Getting info into the system
Storage
Involves information retention (short term and long term)
Retrieval
Finding information from memory
Basic model of memory as separate systems
This model basically posits that there is some sensory input, for instance you see something in the street, and this goes into your sensory memory. If you don’t do anything with this, the information is lost. But if you work with this information, if you rehearse it, it is stored in your long-term-memory. If you do not rehearse this, the information is lost. Our memory has separate systems, and you go from system 1 to system 2 to system 3 to system 4.
Sensory input => sensory memory => short-term memory (STM) => long-term memory (LTM)
Study by Sperling on memory as separate systems.
Participants were briefly shown a screen with 12 letters (3 by 4). Participants were asked to remember only one row of letters. But they did not know which row in advance, they were supposed to remember. Only after the screen was gone, they learned which row to learn.
Sperling states that even if you are shown something so briefly, it can be remembered. He did a study where he gave participants a high tone, a middle tone or a low tone after they were shown the letters. Respectively the top, middle or low row.
By hearing the tone people were better at reproducing the letters on the screen, so they are suddenly better at remembering the information represented so briefly.
This means that there is a memory trace that you can still pick up or access, but only when you do something with the information, in this case the reconnection with the tone.
This fits with the notion that you go from the sensory stage to the short-term stage.
Evidence for separate systems
STM retrieval faster than LTM retrieval
- Because you are still using the information.
STM: limited capacity
- The magic number is 7 +/- 2.
- If you rehearse it you can remember more, but then it’s no longer in your STM.
Primacy (rehearsed more => LTM) and recency (still in STM) effects
- Primacy effect: items that are presented in the beginning are recalled better and more often than the items that are presented in the middle of the list.
- Recency effect: items presented at the end of the list are recalled better and more often than the items that are presented in the middle of the list.
A study by Glanzer and Cunitz about serial position effects and the primacy and recency effects.
A study by Glanzer and Cunitz, where participants had to recall a list of words and they were either asked to do this immediately after the list was presented or after a 30 second delay.
There is definitely a primacy and recency effect. For the primacy effect it doesn’t matter if it was recalled immediately or after 30 seconds. But for the recency effect there was a difference, immediately after it was remembered, but after 30 second this effect disappeared.
This is evidence for STM and LTM and that they are separate systems.
More evidence for separate systems
STM: sensitive to phonological, acoustic coding => confusing Pee and Tea.
LTM: semantic => confusing Big and Huge.
- STM and LTM appear to use a different form of coding.
- STM participants are more likely to confuse items that sound alike.
- With LTM participants are more likely to confuse items that are conceptually alike.
Neurological impairments (STM may be affected while LTM still intact, and the other way around)
- Studies on amnesia, where the STM works just fine, but the LTM doesn’t.
- There are also studies where the LTM works just fine and the STM doesn’t.
Do all researchers agree with the separate systems?
Not every researcher agrees that the systems are separate. Some are very extreme and say they are not separate at all. Others don’t abandon the idea of separate system but just add something to the model. Like Hitch and Baddely, they added something to the model and made the multi component working memory model.
The multi component working memory model by Hitch and Baddely
They say that there is this thing that is the central executive. It does not have its own storage capacity, what is does is that it supervise and coordinates the sub subsystems.
The subsystems:
- Phonological loop
- Visuospatial sketchpad
- Episodic buffer
So the central executive determines where the attention goes to and which information is stored in the LTM.
Phonological loop
Is responsible for short term memory storage, like sound and speech.
Visuospatial sketchpad
Responsible for breath storage and manipulation of visual information
Episodic buffer
Stores and integrates information from LTM, the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad.
According to the multi component working memory model, what determines whether you use your STM or LTM?
Attention
What do you test if you want to test the effect of an advertisment?
You want to assess memory. You can do this in two ways, implicitly or explicitly.
Explicit memory
Conscious awareness
These are old ways to measure memory
- Recall (e.g., what was the commercial about?)
- Recognition
Implicit memory
Unconscious awareness
More modern ways to measure memory
- Word stem completion
- Word fragment identification
- Lexical decision task
Word stem completion
People are given the stem (first part of the word) and then have to complete it.
E.g., COM…, if they just saw an ad about a computer, they might finish the word as computer, if it was about communication, they would say communication.
