The Contribution of Attention to the Mere Exposure Effect for Parts of Advertising Images

Yagi, Yoshihiko; Inoue, Kazuya

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01635

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol., 05 September 2018

Sec. Cognition

Volume 9 - 2018 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01635

The Contribution of Attention to the Mere Exposure Effect for Parts of Advertising Images

$\r\nYoshihiko Yagi*&#x;$ Yoshihiko Yagi^1*†

Kazuya Inoue^2†

¹Faculty of Psychology, Rissho University, Shinagawa-ku, Japan
²Faculty of Engineering, Information, and Systems, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

Repeatedly presented stimuli are affectively evaluated more positively than novel stimuli. This phenomenon, known as the mere exposure effect, is used in advertising. However, it is still unclear in which part of advertising images the mere exposure effect occurs. Given the recent suggestion that attention plays an important role in the mere exposure effect, it is possible that the mere exposure effect does not occur for commercial products when advertising images consist of a commercial product along with an attractive human model. To investigate this possibility, we manipulated the relationship between advertising images repeatedly presented in an exposure phase and images presented in a later rating phase. In the exposure phase, participants were repeatedly presented with advertising images consisting of a cosmetic product along with an attractive female model and were instructed to attend to a specified part of the image (Experiment 4) or were given no such an instruction (Experiments 1, 2, and 3). In the rating phase, participants were asked to evaluate their preference for complete advertising images (Experiment 1), the images of female models (Experiment 2), or images of products (Experiments 3 and 4) that were previously presented or not presented. The mere exposure effect was found for whole advertising images and images of female models. On the other hand, the mere exposure effect for the images of products was seen only when participants were explicitly encouraged to direct their attention to the product parts of the advertising image. That is, the results of this study suggest that the mere exposure effect does not always occur for every part of the repeated advertising images, and that attention would modulate the mere exposure effect for advertising images.

Introduction

Almost all commercial companies use advertising to increase sales of their products. According to one advertising model, the dual mediation hypothesis (MacKenzie et al., 1986), attitudes toward advertisements influence a customer’s intention to purchase through affecting both attitude toward brands and brand cognition. Several mechanisms are involved in changing attitudes through advertising, such as evaluative conditioning (Stuart et al., 1987; Pleyers et al., 2007) and self-referencing (Lee et al., 2002). Another important mechanism in attitude change is the mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968), in which repeatedly presented stimuli are evaluated more positively than novel stimuli. In fact, previous studies have demonstrated that repeated presentation of banner and television advertisements increase positive attitudes toward the advertisements (Fang et al., 2007) and advertised brands (Yoo, 2008).

To facilitate the application of the mere exposure effect on advertising, it is important to clarify the characteristics of the mere exposure effect in terms of human factors. For this purpose, an important factor for consideration is selective attention. Several studies have demonstrated the importance of selective attention in affective modulation of exposed stimuli (Raymond et al., 2003; Yagi et al., 2009; Huang and Hsieh, 2013). For example, Yagi et al. (2009) reported that the supraliminal mere exposure effect occurred only for an object selected by attention. Here, participants were repeatedly presented with a composite figure consisting of a red polygon and a green polygon. The participants were required to attend to either or both of the colored components. Results showed that the mere exposure effect was obtained only for the polygons morphologically identical to the previously attended polygons. The effect of selective attention on affective evaluation has also been reported in studies of the distractor devaluation effect (Raymond et al., 2003), in which previously unattended objects are devalued relative to previously attended objects or novel objects. The results of these studies contradict the naïve intuition that the mere exposure effect always occurs for every part of a previously exposed complex stimulus.

The fact that the mere exposure effect cannot always occur for every part of complex stimuli is especially important in terms of change of attitude through advertising imagery. Advertising images often contain commercial products as well as celebrity or attractive models (Sliburyte, 2009). Thus, if the attractive model, rather than the commercial product, captures a viewer’s attention it is possible that the mere exposure effect does not occur for commercial products but for the attractive models, which would be undesirable for the sponsor of the advertisement. This phenomenon is likely to occur given the previous studies of attention. For example, human faces obligatorily captured attention even though the faces were unrelated to the task required for participants (Sato and Kawahara, 2015). In addition, attractive faces were more difficult to ignore than unattractive faces even though these faces were task-unrelated (Sui and Liu, 2009).

The aim of the present study is to clarify what part of an advertising image triggers the mere exposure effect. To achieve this aim, we mainly manipulated the relationship between advertising images repeatedly presented in an exposure phase and images presented in a later rating phase. In the exposure phase of all experiments, participants were repeatedly presented with advertising images consisting of multiple objects, specifically, a commercial product and an attractive, female model. In the rating phase of Experiment 1, participants were asked to evaluate their preference for the exposed advertising images and for unexposed advertising images. The aim was to ensure whether the mere exposure effect occurred for the exposed advertising images themselves. In contrast, in the rating phase of subsequent experiments, a female model (Experiment 2) or a product (Experiment 3) previously included in the exposed advertising images was presented to investigate whether the mere exposure effect can occur for only a part of the advertising images. We also replicated Experiment 3 with additional instructions that encouraged participants to direct their attention in the exposure phase to the part of the advertisement containing the product (Experiment 4). This was done to explore the effect of selective attention on, if any, differences in the mere exposure effect between Experiments 2 and 3.

Note that, contrary to Yagi et al. (2009), we did not explicitly manipulate selective attention in the exposure phase of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 because in everyday life people often view advertising images without specific intentions. It is expected that these experiments will extend the implications from Yagi et al. (2009) to the domain of consumer psychology, which should provide useful knowledge to development of the effective design of advertising images.

Experiment 1

The aim of Experiment 1 was to investigate whether the mere exposure effect occurs for the images themselves in advertisements. Understanding this process is important because a recent study suggested that the mere exposure effect occurs only for stimuli whose initial pleasantness is moderate (Delplanque et al., 2015). Therefore, advertising images with an attractive female model may be so positive that the mere exposure effect would not occur. Moreover, this experiment would provide fundamental data to ensure the mere exposure effect occurs for the advertising images used in the present study.

Method

Participants

Twenty-five (14 males and 11 females) adults participated in this experiment for 300 yen (mean age = 19.08 years, SD = 1.06). All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

Apparatus and Stimuli

Stimulus presentation and response collection were controlled by a laptop computer (ZenBook UX31E, ASUSTeK Computer Inc.) running Windows 7. All stimuli were presented on the display of the laptop computer at a resolution of 1024 × 768 pixels, with a viewing distance of 57 cm.

Sixteen published advertising images were obtained from the Internet (Figure 1). Width and height were 960 and 600 pixels, respectively. Each advertising image consisted of a cosmetic product along with a female model. It is known that over exposure diminishes the mere exposure effect (Bornstein et al., 1990). Therefore, models that were unfamiliar to Japanese participants were taken from Chinese and Korean advertisements. The left (right) half area of the advertising images contained the female model whereas the remaining half area contained the cosmetic product. Based on results of the pilot study, the advertising images were divided into two sets, each with approximately the same values of preference.

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 1. A schematic illustration (left) and the contour graph (right) of the advertising images used in the experiments. To create the contour graph, advertising images in which a female model was located on the right side of the image were reflected along the vertical axis. Then all pixels of each image were binarized (0 as the background containing neither a female model nor a product and 1 as the area containing either the model or the product) and all images consisting of binary values were combined into the image of the contour graph. The higher (lower) contour value and more yellowish (bluish) colors indicates areas that had the greater (lesser) overlap of female models or products across the images.

Procedure

All procedures in this and following experiments were approved by the local ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology, Rissho University. In accordance with the ethics code of the American Psychological Association, at the beginning of the experiments, participants were informed of the expected duration of the experiment and their right to decline or withdraw from the experiment.

Experiment 1 consisted of an exposure phase and a rating phase. In the exposure phase, each trial began with the presentation of a fixation point for 500 ms, immediately followed by the presentation of an advertising image for 500 ms. After the removal of the advertising image, a blank display was presented for 1500 ms, which was followed by the fixation point for the next trial. Participants were asked to focus on the advertising image during a trial. The exposure phase consisted of 64 experimental trials as follows. Each participant was assigned to one of the two sets of eight advertising images; assignment was counterbalanced across participants. Each advertising image was presented eight times in random order, with the restriction that the same image never appeared on three consecutive trials.

In the rating phase, a fixation point was presented for 500 ms, immediately followed by the presentation of an advertising image along with a 5-point rating scale ranging from 1 = not preferable to 5 = preferable. The participants were asked to rate preference for the advertising image on the scale by pressing a corresponding numerical key. The advertising image remained on the display until the participant’s key press. The rating phase consisted of 16 trials. In half of the trials, advertising images presented in the exposure phase appeared (i.e., the exposed condition) whereas in the remaining trials novel advertising images not presented in the exposure phase appeared (i.e., the novel condition). The presentation order of the advertising images was completely randomized across participants. After finishing the rating phase, participants were asked to report whether they noticed the purpose of the experiment throughout the experiment.

Results and Discussion

We excluded participants that were aware of the purpose of the experiment from all the data analyses to avoid demand characteristics, such as participants’ responses to fulfill the expectations of the experimenter. In Experiment 1, one participant became aware of the purpose of the experiment and was excluded from the following analysis. Figure 2 shows the means of preference scores for the exposed and novel conditions. We used a two-tailed paired t test to compare the exposed condition with the novel condition, which showed that the mean preference score was significantly higher in the exposed condition, compared to the novel condition, t(23) = 2.36, p = 0.03, d_z = 0.48, indicating that the mere exposure effect occurred in Experiment 1. That is, results of Experiment 1 suggest that repeated presentation of complex advertising images consisting of a product along with a female model, induces the mere exposure effect for the exposed advertising images themselves.

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 2. Mean preference scores in Experiments 1–4 (Error bars are MSE). The black and white bars indicate the results in the exposed and novel conditions, respectively. The labels of the x-axis denote the experiment number and objects that were evaluated.

Experiment 2

The aim of Experiment 2 was to investigate the mere exposure effect for the female model part of advertising images. Participants were repeatedly presented with whole advertising images in the exposure phase and were asked to rate preference for the images of female models in the rating phase.