CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the study
People are exposed to a tremendous amount of commercial or non-commercial information every day. The average person would be exposed to over 1,500 advertising a day, aware of less than 70 of them, and remember only 5 to 10 ads (Kotler, Bowen, &Makens, 2010). This screening-out process can be explained by the concept of selective attention which reduces the load on limited-capacity cognitive systems by filtering irrelevant information from the stimulus stream (Downing, 2000). The consumer’s selective attention implies how hard it is for marketers to successfully hold consumers’ initial attentions through advertising materials. In the marketing and consumer behavior field, many studies suggest the importance of attentions as predictors of consumers’ attitude toward an object or advertisement (e.g., MacKenzie& Lutz, 1989). However, it has been noted that an important limitation of existing research in marketing, consumer behavior and social psychology is that there are relatively less efforts to empirically examine the role of attention in persuasion (Eagly&Chaiken, 1993). Psychologists focused on cognitive research have been interested in how what is currently on our minds affects what we currently look at (e.g., Desimone& Duncan, 1995; Sreenivasan, Katz, &Jah, 2007). Recent research on the interactions between visual working memory and visual attention fits in the research question (Oh & Kim, 2004; Soto & Humphreys, 2006). The underlying assumption is that visual attention and visual working memory share important processes as well as content representations. Working memory is defined as the active maintenance of a representation after the stimulus that produced it is no longer present (Downing, 2000). It is generally assumed that working memory and attention appear very similar, in that both dimensions postulate the activation and prioritization of information relevant to the task at hand over information that is currently irrelevant (Olivers, 2009). Understanding color effects on people’s attention and working memory has been an important research area in cognitive psychology. Despite inconclusive arguments across time and settings (Madden, Hewett, & Roth, 2000), there are few general consensus in regard to color effects. First, full color generally holds more attention than black and white (Schaie&Heiss, 1964), and second warm colors (e.g., red) generate more arousal and attention than cool colors (e.g., blue) (Birren, 1978). In addition, it is reported that cool colors elicit greater relaxation and pleasure than warm colors (Jabocs& Seuss, 1975). Additional color and advertising studies suggest that background color effectsare qualified by the contrast between the background color and the color of the text or content (Fernandez & Rosen, 2000; Hall & Hanna, 2004; Moore, Stammerjohan, & Coulter, 2005). In contradiction, Popper and Murray (1989) examined the effectiveness of high versus low contrasting background color on the message, but found no significant differences between the contrast conditions. Many researchers have examined the basic link between attention and working memory considering color effect. However, there has been little research endeavor on the issue of attention and memory in the hospitality and tourism industry. It is logically presumed that the constructs would be more important in the field, in that most products and services in the hospitality and tourism are symbolic and image-oriented which requires more attention and memory. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore color effect on people’s visual attention and working memory by employing the images of tourist attractions as stimuli. To achieve the goal, the computerized experiment manipulated memory load in a primary task and measured its attention cost on a secondary task across sequential positions. More specifically, this study examines how different colors affect people’s attentions and memory by requiring participants to do a dual task (i.e., box shooting and seeing different types of photos).
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
With the realization of the importance of attention in decision-making process in consumer behavior,advertisers and marketers devote considerable time and effort to designing attention-getting appeals. Many scholarsexamining consumer behavior from an information-processing perspective argue that the attention step in messageprocessing controls a substantial portion of the variability in consumer decisions (e.g., Bettman, 1979). Attention hasbeen explored extensively by cognitive psychologist, and if broadly defined to include people’s perceptual areassuch as selective attention, distortion, and retention, it is clear that there is a great deal of relevant socialpsychological research on these topics. It is in view of the above that the researcher intends to investigate the impact of color presentation in magazine advertising