Encoding specificity principle: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:58, 18 October 2011

Revision as of 21:02, 18 October 2011

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===Encoding Specificity and Advertising===

In 1993, Friestad and Thorson conducted a study examining how a person’s emotional states and the inherent nature of television advertisements affected recall of ads. It was designed to contribute to the understanding of memory for advertisements. The researchers utilized the encoding specificity principle and previously known information about advertising to direct their hypothesis: emotionally driven commercials are less memorable and recallable than neutral advertisements. 123 subjects viewed one of three versions of a 20 minute tape containing program material, extraneous ads, and the 10 target ads (five emotional and five neutral). After doing a distractor task to deteriorate short-term memory for the ads, subjects were given a surprise recall test. They were given 20 retrieval cues (two per target ad) and were to respond with a verbal description of the ad that came to mind. They were then instructed to write down their emotional responses to the ads, their attention levels, their opinion on product-use, and their prior exposure to the ads.

All aspects of this experiment were analyzed in light of the encoding specificity principle and the distinction between episodic and semantic memory structures. The researchers found that when the nature of the advertisement was emotional, an encoding focus on episodic memory (trying to carefully remember the visual content of the commercial) led to a much higher rate of recall. Conversely, when advertisements were neutral in emotional nature, a semantic encoding of memory (how advertisement shapes personal perceptions, preferences of given object advertised) led to a much higher recall of specific advertisements. The experimenters claim that “applying a theoretical model of how encoding and retrieval processes affect the accessibility of ad memory traces helps us understand the ‘communication effects’ that occur during and after consumers’ processing of TV advertising’”^1. This empirical evidence regarding the nature of emotional advertising provides data to the advertising industry as to how to contour their ads to maximize recall of advertisements.

===Encoding Specificity and Social Cognition===

===Encoding Specificity and Deja Vu===

==Theory==

==Criticism==