When television advertisement overwhelms viewers: Application of Information Introduced and physiological measures on television advertisement message processing

Abstract

This paper reports the data from an ongoing study that attempts to validate Lang's coding system that indexes the amount of information included in a video message named Information Introduced (or, I-Squared; see Lang, Bradley, Park, Shin, and Chung (2006) and Lang, Park, Sanders-Jackson, Wilson, and Wang (2007) for review) by measuring physiological measures to see if they correlate with other measures (e.g., recognition memory test results). Though statistical significance was not achieved, heart rate deceleration was in the predicted direction that suggests as cognitive resources required-to-cognitive resource allocated ratio (operationalized as I-Squared value/Camera changes, or ii/cc) grows from medium to high, attention level starts to fall, indicative of cognitive overload. A significant difference in recognition memory supports this interpretation.