Exposure, Attention, and Perception PDF

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Exposure Welcome to the Consumer Behaviour video series. The first series of videos will focus on the Perceptual Process. In this video, Part 1, we’re focusing specifically on Exposure, the first part of the perceptual process. The perceptual process is how information gets from the external world into consumers’ minds. Pretty much all of consumer behavior and marketing involves this process in some way. There are thousands of pieces of information competing for our attention every day, and understanding how the perceptual process works helps us to understand how this information influences us as consumers. And it’s not just visual information! Any stimulus perceived by the five senses is information that can enter the perceptual process and influence consumer behavior. The perceptual process has three stages – exposure, attention, and perception. The first stage, exposure, describes how consumers first come into contact with information. The second stage, attention, describes whether or not consumers notice and pay attention to the information. And the third stage, perception, is about how consumers interpret or understand information that they’ve paid attention to. These stages exist in a hierarchical relationship, like a funnel. Consumers must be exposed to information in order to pay attention to it, and attention must occur in order for perception to happen. Also like a funnel, the amount of information that we are exposed to is much larger than the amount of information that we attend to or perceive. In this video we will focus just on the first stage, exposure. Exposure is the process by which consumers come into contact with a marketing stimulus, without necessarily paying attention to it. We’re exposed to countless stimuli every day, and we ignore the vast majority of it. But even stimuli that we don’t consciously pay attention to can still affect us. Most of what we know about exposure in consumer behaviour in is in the visual domain. Visual information includes images and text, such as logos or brand names. Some research has started to look at the other senses as well, but visual stimuli is the domain that marketers presently have the most control over. In other words, marketers can easily disseminate visual stimuli to consumers via advertisements, websites, product design, and so on, whereas it's often harder to broadly disseminate smells, sounds, tastes, and other sensory stimuli as part of a marketing campaign. Marketers care about exposing consumers to their products, logos, and ads, even if consumers aren’t actively paying attention to that information. A major reason behind this is known as the mere exposure effect. Through the mere exposure effect, the more often we are exposed to a given stimulus, the more familiar it becomes, and the more familiar it becomes, the more we like it. Familiar things are more fluent, which means they are easier to process. And this fluency gets misattributed to positive feelings towards the stimulus itself. In other words, frequent exposure to a stimulus generally makes us like that stimulus more, because it becomes easier to process, and humans like things are easy. This helps explain why marketers care about exposing consumers to their product’s logos and ads, even if the consumers aren’t really paying attention.

For example, an early study exposed people to Chinese characters and nonsense words, stimuli that had no inherent meaning to the participants. But they found that the more often people were exposed to these meaningless stimuli, the more they actually liked them. Other studies have shown that the mere exposure effect also works for logos, for sounds like jingles and brand names, for tastes, and even for smells. One recent study looked at the effect of mere exposure on actual product choice. Researchers showed participants a variety of pictures like this one, which either included a Dasani water bottle placed somewhere in the image or… did not. After viewing the photos, participants were told that they could choose a bottle of water to take home with them at the end of the study. They were given four options: a Dasani water bottle, and three other brands. As you can see, the participants in this study were more than twice as likely to choose Dasani to take home with them if they had seen images featuring Dasani bottles compared to if they had seen images without Dasani bottles. So you can see that mere exposure can influence actual product choices, and that this has real world implications for product placement and advertising. You might be wondering if there’s a limit to the mere exposure effect. For example, if you’ve heard the same ad jingle dozens of times, it might start getting really annoying so that more exposures start to have negative effects rather than positive effects on liking. This does indeed seem to be the case across most types of stimuli. On average, repeated exposure increases liking up to around 20 to 30 exposures, after which liking either levels off or starts to decrease. Much of what we know about mere exposure, however, comes from lab studies in which all exposures occurred on the same day. This means that we don’t know for sure how the effects of mere exposure play out over longer periods of time, such as weeks or months. But within a given experience – such as watching a movie, a TV show, or a sporting event – we know enough to say that mere exposure to a product or logo within that experience will likely affect consumers’ attitudes towards the stimulus. One more caveat to the mere exposure effect is that it doesn’t work for already disliked stimuli. So if there’s a smell you really hate, just smelling it more often won’t suddenly make you like it more. The mere exposure effect is therefore most relevant to stimuli that are relatively neutral to begin with. You may also be wondering how impactful mere exposure is. It usually has relatively small-butsignificant effects on consumers’ attitudes and behaviors. Mere exposure has a greater impact when exposure happens for short intervals of around 1 to 3 seconds. It is less impactful when the exposure occurs for very short intervals or for very long intervals. Mere exposure is also more impactful when the time between exposures is shorter, and can become actually negative when the time between exposures is long. Let’s briefly discuss three other phenomena that are closely related to the mere exposure effect: the illusory truth effect; fake news; and perceptions of fame. First, the illusory truth effect is when repeated exposure to a factual statement increases our judgments of the statement’s truth. So if you hear that the zipper was invented in Norway multiple times, you’ll be more likely to believe that statement is true.

Over the years, many different researchers have studied this illusory truth effect. In this metaanalysis, which is a statistical summary of many published papers, the researchers looked at 51 separate studies and concluded that the truth effect is reliably observed by multiple researchers. In other words, it is a very real phenomenon. Also closely related is the issue of fake news and misinformation. Since people are more likely to believe that a statement is true after they've seen it or read it multiple times, in this way fake news that is spread widely and repeated often can become more influential and impactful on people’s beliefs. In one recent study, participants were shown a fake news headline like this one, either once, twice, or not at all, and the headline either came with a warning label attached like this or... did not. More exposures to the fake news headline increased participants’ belief that the headline was, in fact, true. And this happened regardless of whether there was a warning attached or not. So you can see how mere exposure can even impact important social issues, like belief in fake news. And finally, perceptions of fame. We’re more likely to think a given name is famous if we’ve read it before (even if we’re told that the name isn’t famous) compared to if we haven’t read it before. In one study, participants read a list of names that they were told were not the names of famous people. Twenty-four hours later, they were more likely to think that these names were famous compared to names they had not read before. Can you think about how this instance of mere exposure could apply to branding? So in summary, exposure in and of itself can increase feelings of familiarity or fluency, which in turn can increase liking, perceived truth, and perceived fame. This all occurs even if consumers aren’t paying active attention to the stimuli in question. Mere exposure is most powerful when exposures to the stimuli are short, repeated multiple times, and occur within a short period of time. But of course, if you want consumers to be actually processing the information that you as a marketer are sharing, exposure is not enough. One reason for this is simply information overload. There’s so much information out there competing for our attention as consumers, both online and offline, that the effect of being exposed to one or one ad among thousands is unlikely to itself have a large effect. This highlights the importance of also understanding the next two stages of the perceptual process, attention and perception. In this video we looked at exposure, which is the first stage of the perceptual process of how information gets from the external world into consumers’ minds. In the next two videos, we’ll go into detail about the next two stages of the perceptual process. Attention Welcome back to the Consumer Behaviour video series. This video looks at the second stage of the perceptual process—attention. Recall that the perceptual process is how information gets from the external world into consumers’ minds. It has three steps, which occur in sequence. Exposure is the first step, where consumers simply come into contact with a stimulus. Attention is the second step, where consumers notice a stimulus and devote cognitive resources to it—

they attend to it. Perception is the third step, where consumers interpret and make sense of what they are paying attention to. We’ve seen that exposure alone can influence consumers’ attitudes and choices, but of course marketers often want consumers to actively pay attention to their messages, because information has a greater impact on attitudes and choices when it’s the focus of attention, rather than just background exposure. So it’s also important for us to understand how attention operates. So what is attention? Psychologists usually use a metaphor to explain attention. They say it’s like a spotlight. Of course, it’s a lot more complicated than a spotlight, but the metaphor can still be useful. Like a spotlight, attention is limited and selective. It’s limited, because we can only “shine” our attention on specific inputs or stimuli at any given time—we can only pay real attention to a very limited number of inputs. Here are two short videos illustrating how attention is limited and selective. (external video plays) So you can see that even in this very limited set of inputs - just watching a simple video attention is so limited and selective that focusing on one aspect of the video can make us “blind” to the other inputs. Let’s look at one more example of limited and selective attention. (external video plays) So we’ve seen how attention is limited and selective. Let’s introduce another important distinction. Attention is shaped by top-down and bottom-up factors. Top-down factors are usually voluntary processes—things we actively choose, like our goals and intentions, higher order cognitive processes, and selecting inputs. In the gorilla video, you had a goal to count the number of passes. This goal then shaped what inputs you paid attention to while watching the video. Bottom-up factors are features of the stimuli or inputs themselves that makes us more or less likely to notice them. Usually, bottom-up factors capture attention involuntarily, without us intending to pay attention, noticing inputs. Something like a sudden noise or movement capturing your attention involuntarily. Let’s look at top-down and bottom-up factors in a bit more detail, starting with top-down. Let’s say you have the goal of finding a new apartment for yourself. Once you get to the website you use to search, this goal will lead you to pay attention to certain parts of the website that are relevant to your goal, and not pay attention to other parts that are irrelevant, such as the ads on the site. This is an example of a phenomenon known as banner blindness. Online, consumers tend to ignore everything that looks like an ad, such as the banners on the side, top, or bottom of many websites, and they’re pretty good at it. These images show heatmaps of what website users pay visual attention to. Notice they don’t pay much attention at all to the banners. Similarly, as you can see from this image from an eye tracking study, the first results in a Google search often get overlooked, literally. We’ve learned that ads are usually not very relevant to our goals, so we’ve learned not to pay attention to them. This phenomenon really highlights the importance of distinguishing between exposure and attention. We’re exposed to dozens of ads each day, but we don’t pay much attention to most of them, so they have limited impact on our attitudes and choices. Here’s another example of topdown factors driving attention—the goal of paying attention to things relevant to ourselves. One thing that’s highly relevant to yourself is your name. Because of this, we’re very likely to notice when someone says our name, even if we’re not consciously paying attention to that person.

This is illustrated by the cocktail party effect. If you’re at a party and someone across the room says your name, you’re likely to hear it, even though you weren’t consciously paying attention to that conversation. You can then shift your attention away from the conversation directly in front of you to start paying attention to the conversation across the room. This example actually illustrates how top down and bottom up factors work together. We have the top down goal to pay attention to self-relevant information, and yet it’s bottom up factors that make information self-relevant or not. Hearing our name spoken captures our attention in a bottom up fashion, because we have the top down goal to pay attention to self relevant information. Here’s one more example of top-down goals influencing attention. We all have the goal, to varying degrees, to confirm our existing beliefs. This is one of the major biases that affect human thinking. It’s called confirmation bias. This is the tendency to favor information that conforms to our existing beliefs and discount or ignore information that does not. Confirmation bias, therefore, shapes what we pay attention to. It can make us less likely to click on or read articles that we think we'll disagree with, and less likely to notice examples of our own behavior that are inconsistent with how we want to see ourselves. Think about how social media can contribute to and even exacerbate confirmation bias, by making it easier to see only information that supports your existing beliefs. Groups of friends and families tend to have similar beliefs, so your Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds are likely to be full of information that confirms what you already believe. This is a good example of how new technologies can interact with old psychological processes to shape consumer behavior. While top down factors help us select what stimuli to pay attention to, bottom up factors are the features of the stimuli themselves that make them more noticeable. Before we go through some examples of bottom-up factors, it’s worth noting that they pertain mostly to “grabbing” rather than “keeping” attention, whereas top-down factors can do both. The factors that grab attention are not necessarily the same factors that keep or hold our attention. For example, attention is often immediately drawn to scary or unpleasant images (like graphic warning labels on cigarettes, for example), but we prefer not to keep our attention engaged with such unpleasant inputs for very long. Many bottom up factors can be grouped into a few categories. Stimuli that are personally relevant, easy to process, or surprising/novelty, are more likely to capture attention. Let’s look at a few examples of each of these categories. We’ve seen the importance of personal relevance already. Since we have the intention or goal to pay attention to things that are relevant to us, stimuli that have personal relevance are going to be more likely to capture attention. So our attention is naturally drawn to people that look like us, or to seeing our own name or initials. More broadly, things that can help us solve problems or meet needs that are important to us will be more likely to capture attention. This is why personalized advertising is so important. If you can tailor an ad based on the likely viewer’s demographics or needs, the ad will be more relevant and more likely to capture their attention. Another important application of personal relevance is seen in smartphones and social media. We all know these technologies are extremely effective at grabbing and keeping our attention for long periods of time - some people even worry about “addictions” to these technologies. One reason they are so attention grabbing is that they are extremely personally relevant. Any time we get a notification on our phones, it’s something for us, about us, or generally relevant to us. In addition to personal relevance, stimuli that are easy to process, either visually or mentally, are also more likely to grab attention. For example, a product’s position in the environment,

online or offline, contributes to how easy it is to process and how likely it is to be noticed. So along the vertical dimension, for example, from top to bottom of a shelf display, products at eye level are more likely to be noticed. Along the horizontal dimension, from left to right, products in the center are more likely to grab attention. Another factor that makes stimuli easy to process is perceptual contrast. This just means that it’s easier to notice things that are contrasting with their surroundings. Contrast can be achieved visually, and audio contrast can have similar effects. Here’s an ad that uses left and right audio channels. (Mcdonald’s advertisement plays) Similarly, researchers have also found that turning background music in ads on and off can be used to enhance attention towards key pieces of information. A third category of bottom-up factors is surprise or novelty. Sudden sounds or movements grab our attention immediately and involuntarily, which is adaptive in evolutionary terms. Novel stimuli that we haven’t seen before can also grab attention because we don’t know what to make of them. We’ll wrap up this video on a more practical note. We know that digital technologies like smartphones are effective attention grabbers and keepers. This is true of many other digital technologies as well, like email. Because email is so good at grabbing our attention, it has major consequences for our ability to focus and be productive.  85% of work emails are opened within two minutes of being received.  Each email is usually an interruption of some other task, and these interruptions eat up almost a third(28%) of the average workday.  It takes an average of 24 minutes to get back on task after being interrupted by an email.  And the average employee spends two hours of their day on email. Like how social media can exacerbate the confirmation bias, this is another example of technology directly engaging with deep psychological processes, like the goal to pay attention to personal relevance, which can have negative effects on our lives. By the way, the companies that build these products (Google, Facebook, and so on), have whole teams of PhDs in psychology and behavioral science who try to make the products grab and hold attention as much as possible, since more people spending more time on their platforms lets them sell more ads and make more money. Keep this in mind as you observe how much time you spend engaging with these technologies, and how they affect you. Recently, resea...