Title: What is More Memorable, Counterintuitive Concepts Interpreted Metaphorically or Literally?
Abstract: What is More Memorable, Counterintuitive Concepts Interpreted Metaphorically or Literally? M. Afzal Upal ([email protected]) Intelligent Agents & Multiagent Systems Lab University of Toledo Toledo, OH 43606 USA flying oak). Not all of this comes as a surprise to marketing researchers who have long known about the role played by novelty in making advertisements memorable. Indeed creative designers often employ elements that are designed to violate and challenge consumer’s preconceived notions about a brand (Lee & Schumann 2004). Several studies show that incongruent ads are more likely to be perceived as original, humorous, and produce positive affective responses than congruent ads (Lee and Mason 1999; Alden, Mukherjee, & Hoyer 2000). Hecklers and Childers (1992) found that some types of incongruent ads are better recalled than congruent ads. Abstract A survey of randomly selected sample of television advertisements indicated that a significant number of these ads contain counterintuitive concepts. This makes sense in light of recent findings that suggest that minimally counterintuitive ideas are more memorable than intuitive ideas. However, a subsequent experiment performed to investigate the role of context in the memorability of such concepts suggested that counterintuitive concepts are only more memorable when they are interpreted literally rather than metaphorically. Keywords: cognition and culture, counterintuitive concepts, memory, language Introduction What is it that makes some ideas more memorable than others? Why do people remember some messages while forgetting others? Finding answers to such question is not only important for cognition and culture researchers but also for marketing experts, consumer researchers, and advertisement designers who have to design ads that cut through the clutter of hundreds, if not thousands, of advertising messages that average consumer is bombarded with every day (Lasn 1999). Advertisers have to make sure that consumers remember their ads and recall them when they make their purchasing decisions better than their competitor’s ads. It is not surprising then that marketing researches have considered a number of factors that are thought to impact the memorability for advertisements. These include relevance of an advertisement (Heckler & Childers 1992), the emotional appeal of an ad (Huang 2004), and the incongruity of an ad with the customer expectations, sometimes called the “shock-value” of an ad (Dahl, Frankenberger, & Manchanda 2003). Cognition and culture researchers, however, have proposed another variable not considered, to date, by the marketing researchers namely, the counterintuitiveness of an idea. Boyer (1994), Sperber (1996), and others have argued that everything else being equal, minimally counterintuitive concepts (i.e., concepts that violate one ontological expectation) such as the concept of a sobbing oak) are more memorable than intuitive (concepts that do not violate any ontological expectations (such as a green oak) and maximally counterintuitive concepts (i.e., concepts that violate multiple ontological expectation such as a talking This evidence is supplanted by the work in social psychology and schema theory which indicates that when new information that is somehow incongruent with prior expectations or schema is presented, individuals will engage in more effortful or elaborative processing (Hastie and Kumar 1979; Mandler 1982). This extra processing of schema-violating information results in enriched connections being established among the new piece of information and existing knowledge structures which in turn results in better recall for the new information. This may explain why counterintuitive concepts are better recalled by people than intuitive concepts. Counterintuitive ideas that involve violations of expectations of basic categories should specially have transmission advantages as knowledge about such categories is shared by most people and hence are likely to bee seen as incongruent by most people. However, it does not explain as to why maximally counterintuitive concepts which violate even more intuitive expectations and hence should result in even more elaborate processing are not recalled better than minimally counterintuitive concepts. To explain the better recall for minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI), previously (Upal 2005) I have argued that maximally counterintuitive concepts are not recalled well because they cannot be coherently organized into an easy to remember schema (or that they have low postdictability). The memorability hypothesis (Upal 2005; Upal et al. 2007) states that the concepts and the contexts that maximize the (postdictability − predictability) value should be best remembered by a learning agent that aims to build a predictive model of its environment because they offer most new information that cannot be foreseen by that agent.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 15
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