Priyali Rajagopal, an assistant professor of marketing at SMU, and Nicole Votolato Montgomery, an assistant professor of marketing at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., developed an experiment to test the effects of advertisements on memory.
By Chris Gorski
Inside Science News Service
Advertising is everywhere people look. It's along the highway, in storefronts, and online. It can be funny or poignant; it can be annoying. New research shows it can also encourage people to recall things that never happened to them.
Nicole Votolato Montgomery, an assistant professor of marketing at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and Priyali Rajagopal, an assistant professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas, developed an experiment to test the effects of advertisements on memory.
They asked people to read a very descriptive print advertisement detailing the taste of a fictional popcorn product made by a familiar brand name, then asked a portion of the subjects to taste popcorn labeled with the fictional name. A week later, those who merely read the detailed advertisement were just as likely to report eating this popcorn as people who actually ate it.
People who read an advertisement with less vivid imagery were far less likely to report eating the popcorn.
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