At the Intersection of Motivational Relevance and Website Visual Complexity: New Evidence for Memory Narrowing and Broadening Effects

• In Event: Motivated Cognition and Behavior

Abstract

Motivational systems can variably affect how different elements within the messages are encoded. Specifically, the appetitive motivational activation leads to improvement in peripheral detail encoding (memory broadening) while the aversive motivation activation impairs peripheral detail encoding leading to memory narrowing. To date, these results have only been tested within single visual events. In this study memory for advertisements shown around the edge of the computer screen during positive and negative movie clips which varied in their arousal level was tested. Consistent with the theoretical expectations arousing positive movies aided encoding of the ads at high levels of complexity (demonstrating memory broadening effect) but negative movies hurt encoding of those (demonstrating memory narrowing effect).

Authors

• Narine S. Yegiyan, University of California, Davis

• You Zhan, U of California - Davis