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The isolation effect and advertising: Are unusual advertisements remembered better?
Abstract
The isolation effect is the finding that memory is improved for items that are distinctive. The isolation effect has led advertisers to suggest that their advertisements should be designed to "stand out" from other advertisements. The current study examined semantic and physical isolation effects for print advertisements. Participants viewed a slideshow containing four advertisements for trashcans. Each advertisement contained a different brand name and feature for the trashcan pictured in the advertisement. In Experiment 1, one of the four advertisements included a product feature rated as highly distinctive (semantic isolate) relative to the product features appearing in the other advertisements. The isolated advertisement in Experiment 2 included a product feature of a different font size and color (physical isolate) than the product features appearing in the other advertisements. Participants were tested on the brand names and features from the advertisements. Unlike previous experiments on isolation effects in advertising, participants were required to remember which feature was presented with which brand. Participants demonstrated an isolation effect, with better recall of the features from the distinctive advertisements than the regular advertisements. This benefit, however, did not reliably extend to memory for the brand names associated with the isolate. These findings demonstrate that the robust nature of the isolation effect is not limited to laboratory settings; rather, the effect is more generalizable and occurs in real-world situations as well.
... While the language used does not have to be very technical or specialized, it is observed that unique information (e.g., live chat, live shop, investments in gold, personalized names) attracts attention and is retained to a greater extent, indicating that presenting information in unexpected ways makes it more probable to be visualized and easier to be memorized. This is not surprising, as the literature gives credit to unique and unexpected forms of presentation for being able to be memorized for a longer period of time [138,139]. ...
... While th language used does not have to be very technical or specialized, it is observed tha unique information (e.g., live chat, live shop, investments in gold, personalize names) attracts attention and is retained to a greater extent, indicating that presen ing information in unexpected ways makes it more probable to be visualized an easier to be memorized. This is not surprising, as the literature gives credit to uniqu and unexpected forms of presentation for being able to be memorized for a longe period of time [138,139]. ...
Websites are one of the most frequently used communication environments, and creating sustainable web designs should be an objective for all companies. Ensuring high usability is proving to be one of the main contributors to sustainable web design, reducing usage time, eliminating frustration and increasing satisfaction and retention. The present paper studies the usability of different website landing pages, seeking to identify the elements, structures and designs that increase usability. The study analyzed the behavior of 22 participants during their interaction with five different landing pages while they performed three tasks on the webpage and freely viewed each page for one minute. The stimuli were represented by five different banking websites, each of them presenting the task content in a different mode (text, image, symbol, graph, etc.).; the data obtained from the eye tracker (fixations location, order and duration, saccades, revisits of the same element, etc.), together with the data from the applied survey lead to interesting conclusions: the top, center and right sides of the webpage attract the most attention; the use of pictures depicting persons increase visibility; the scanpaths follow a vertical and horizontal direction; numerical data should be presented through graphs or tables. Even if a user's past experience influences their experience on a website, we show that the design of the webpage itself has a greater influence on webpage usability.
The effects of isolation and generation on memory for order were investigated in 4 experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effect of isolation on order retention. Previous investigations in this area have yielded equivocal results. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that isolation enhances memory for order: Isolated items were repositioned more accurately than comparable items in control lists. Experiments 3 and 4 investigated the effect of generation on order retention. These experiments revealed that generation can enhance, disrupt, or have no effect on memory for order, depending on the relative number of generated items appearing within a list. Implications of these results for general theoretical accounts of isolation effects in memory are discussed. A simplified version of the feature model (J. S. Nairne, 1990) is shown to provide a general account of isolation effects.
When one item is made distinct from the other items in a list, memory for the distinctive item is improved, a finding known as the isolation or von Restorff effect (after von Restorff, 1933). Although demonstrated numerous times with younger adults and children, this effect has not been found with older adults (Cimbalo & Brink, 1982). In contrast to the earlier study, we obtained a significant von Restorff effect for both younger and older adults using a physical manipulation of font colour. The effect size for older adults was smaller than that obtained for younger adults, confirming a prediction of Naveh-Benjamin's (2000) associative deficit hypothesis, which attributes age-related differences in memory performance to older adults' reduced ability to form associations. The findings are consistent with related research in which older adults demonstrate similar--but smaller--benefits for distinctive information to those for younger adults.
22 men and 38 women in an undergraduate psychology class (M age 19.25 yr.) served in an experiment designed to assess whether a von Restorff effect for advertising slogans could be obtained in an incidental learning situation. The control group rated lists of nine ordinary slogans. The experimental groups rated equal-length lists with a distinctive slogan in the middle of the list. One experimental group rated a slogan considered distinctive because it was of high quality, the other experimental group rated a distinctive slogan considered to be clearly substandard. No mention was made of a test of memory until the rating task and a subsequent distractor task were completed, A significant von Restorff effect was obtained with the high-quality slogan but not with the substandard slogan. A significant relationship between subjects' ratings of slogan distinctiveness and recall was observed.
Two experiments were conducted to examine the effect of very high levels of print ad repetition on brand name recall. In experiment I, the wearout in recall observed in natural settings was replicated in the laboratory. Experiment II examined whether this wearout was attributable to subjects' inattention to ads and reactance to substantial repetition levels. When these factors were controlled experimentally, no wearout was observed; the highest repetition level yielded greater or as much persistence in brand name recall as lower repetition levels. The implications of these data for marketing practice and theory are discussed.
Using an alternate study-recall procedure, 36 male and female college students learned a list of six paired-associates with either the stimulus or the response of one critical pair isolated (printed in red), or without any isolate to a criterion of one perfect recall. Stimulus members were presented in homogeneous form (printed in black) for all Ss during recall trials to control any possible confounding of stimulus-selection process. The results indicated that while the pair with an isolated member was learned better than a control, no differential effect of stimulus and response isolation was obtained. Isolation did not affect the learning of the list as a whole. The isolation effect in paired-associate learning is discussed in terms of a selective rehearsal assumption.
Two short-term memory probe experiments involving the isolation effect (IE) were each done with two groups of children (5–6 and 9–11 years). Strong evidence was found for the IE. In simultaneously presented lists there was evidence for an overall list facilitation due to isolation, and younger children actually performed better on the isolate. The IE in children was described as a short-term perceptual process which is more active in younger than in older children.
Experiment I pointed up the inadequacy of selective attention-rehearsal as an explanation of isolation effects in free recall by demonstrating such an effect without any apparent evidence of more attention-rehearsal having been allocated to the isolated word. An alternative hypothesis was proposed to the effect that a perceptually distinctive word is more often recalled because it is maintained in and retrieved from an accessible isolation mnemonic unit. Experiments II–IV tested this view and showed that (1) isolation of four unrelated words in a list produced recall, clustering, and recognition phenomena which were qualitatively similar to those for four categorically related words in a list, thereby indicating unitization of the unrelated words; and (2) isolation effects did not extend to related but nonisolated words, thus suggesting that an isolation mnemonic category consists mainly of those words which are isolated. It was contended that organizational processes evidenced in situations of multiple word isolation also apply when only one list member is set apart perceptually.
In a face recognition task, photographs of highly unique faces were correctly identified more often by undergraduates than low-unique faces and female faces more frequently than male faces. At both levels of uniqueness, female Ss recognized female faces more frequently than male faces, whereas male Ss recognized male and female faces with equal facility. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Notes that, if the hypothesis of selective rehearsal is used to account for the isolation effect, then the recall of isolated items will depend both on the serial position of the isolated item and on whether recall is immediate or delayed. Predictions from the selective rehearsal hypothesis were generally supported in a 1-trial free-recall test using 32 undergraduates. However, data indicate that some rehearsal may have taken place during the interpolated task. It was also found that total words recalled was no different on isolated and nonisolated lists in immediate recall, but was poorer on the isolated lists with delayed recall. In addition, the recall of an isolated item resulted in significantly less recall of adjacent items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Demonstrated the von Restorff effect in the intentional serial learning and in the Type 2 incidental learning (extrinsic case) of 48 male and 38 female 6th graders and 10 female 5th graders. No substantial evidence was obtained of a spread-of-isolation effect in either intentional or incidental learning. The effects of isolating intentional and incidental items were independent. The Ss tended to use all the response alternatives available on the association test (a matching task) of incidental learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Memory for conceptually isolated (distinctive) words was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, recognition of distinctive targets was compared with recognition of targets from homogeneous lists and with recognition of background information. Distinctive targets were better recognized than the same words presented in homogeneous lists. No effects of distinctiveness on the recognition accuracy of background items were observed. These results fail to support the hypothesis that distinctive information receives extra resources during encoding at the expense of surrounding background information. In Experiment 2 the effects of distinctiveness on recall were evaluated. Distinctive targets were more likely to be recalled than targets from homogeneous lists. However, unlike the effects found in recognition, background items were more poorly recalled from lists containing distinctive targets than from homogeneous lists. Organizational processes in recall were also evaluated. There was greater subjective organization for target and background items from lists containing distinctive targets than from lists containing nondistinctive targets. These results were discussed in terms of encoding and retrieval explanations of the effects of distinctiveness.
College students (n = 36) and elderly persons (n = 28 females, eight males; 60–83 years old) were compared on an immediate-memory task involving an outstanding item in the center of the array. The college students remembered the outstanding item well, the elderly did not. Both groups displayed better overall performance for the list containing the outstanding item. The results are discussed in terms of differences in processing strategies.
In 3 experiments, kindergarten and second-grade children's retention was examined in the context of 2 distinctiveness manipulations, namely, the von Restorff and bizarre imagery paradigms. Specifically, children learned lists of pictures (Experiments 1a and 1b) or interactive images (Experiment 2) and were asked to recall them 3 weeks later. In Experiments 1a and 1b, distinctiveness was manipulated perceptually (changing colors) and conceptually (changing categories or switching to a numeral), whereas in Experiment 2, distinctiveness concerned the interaction (common or bizarre) between the referents. The results showed that (a) older children retained more information than younger children, (b) younger but not older children failed to benefit from numerically distinct information, and (c) distinctiveness in other domains facilitated children's retention. These results highlight the importance of distinctive information in children's retention.