Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Cognitive Processes in Audience Decision Making 113

Attention

Audiences sense and perceive much more information peripherally than they are able to attend to,

focus on, and consciously evaluate. Their attention acts as a bottleneck that enhances the processing

of the stimulus attended to and weakens the processing of all other perceived stimuli. Studies fi nd

that attention plays an important role in audience decision making. For example, consumers’ atten-

tion to advertising controls a substantial portion of the variability in their purchasing decisions.^74

Surprisingly, consumers’ attention to product photos, as measured by pupil dilation,^75 is more highly

correlated with sales of those products than traditional verbal measures of consumers’ attitudes.^76

Stimulus-Driven Attention

There are two types of attention: task driven and stimulus driven. An audience’s attention is task

driven when the audience intentionally searches for a specifi c piece of information. For example,

readers’ attention is task driven when they search a newspaper ad for the price of an item. Listeners’

attention is task driven when they interrupt a speaker to ask a question. In task-driven attention,

the audience’s task guides and controls perception. Even the simple task of reading causes readers

to shift their attention to the next word in a sentence before they have been able to fi xate on it.^77

Task-driven attention is also called search. We treat search more fully later in this chapter in the

section on information acquisition.

An audience’s attention is stimulus driven when they peripherally perceive a stimulus, such as a loud

noise or a fl ashing advertisement on a web page, and divert their attention to it. Certain types of stimuli

are more attention getting than others. For example, information that has clear and direct implications

for personal outcomes is more attention getting and has a greater impact on audience judgments than

information that is not personally relevant.^78 Compared to typical and familiar advertisements, ads that

are novel and original also attract more attention, as indicated by an increase in ad readers’ eye fi xations.^79

The audience’s present goals also make certain stimuli more attention getting to them.^80 For

example, in a study of consumers reading almost 8,000 newspaper ads, nearly twice as many pro-

spective customers recalled seeing the target ad as nonprospective customers, although none of the

readers were intentionally searching for ads.^81 A later eye-tracking study showed that in 98% of the

cases in which prospective customers opened to a page with a target ad, they fi xated on the ad at

least once.^82 For nonprospects, the fi gure was 77%. Of the prospects who noticed the ad, 38% read

it. Only 14% of nonprospects read the ad.^83 Although attention is a factor in all cognitive processes,

our model depicts stimulus-driven attention occurring immediately after the audience senses and

perceives stimuli.

Brain Regions Activated. Separate brain areas are involved in stimulus-driven and task-driven

attention. Stimulus-driven attention, or attentional capture, involves activation of the area at the

front of the inferior frontal junction (IFJ) of the right hemisphere (see Figure 3.4 , p. 108). The

right IFJ is located in the middle region of the right hemisphere’s frontal lobe. Areas in the parietal

lobe may also be involved in stimulus-driven attention. Task-driven attention, on the other hand,

involves an area at the top of the right IFJ, an area in the left IFJ, as well as areas in the parietal

lobe.^84 Disorders associated with all of these regions include defi cits in executive functions that are

typical of early stage dementia.

Constraints on Auditory Attention

In most cases audiences can recall very little about stimuli they do not attend to, even when those

stimuli are perfectly audible or visible.^85 In two seminal studies of auditory attention,^86 listeners