Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Cognitive Processes in Audience Decision Making 107

of presenters are far from passive even while they are sitting quietly, listening to a presentation. As

audiences listen to presentations, they construct goals, evaluate information, express affective reac-

tions, make inferences, interpret information, monitor and activate comprehension repair strategies,

attend to information selectively, integrate information, and ask questions.^19 We saw the same type

of active information processing during reading by the expert audience members who commented

on the sample documents and presentations presented in Chapters 1 and 2.

Another important characteristic of the information-processing approach is that it is content

oriented. It views content as “a substantial determinant of human behavior.”^20 And the approach

views expertise as dependent upon content-specifi c, schema-based, prior knowledge.^21 Thus, the

information-processing approach to decision making differs from the content-free economic theo-

ries of decision making. Unlike economic theories of decision making, it does not use the concepts

of probability and utility to explain decision behavior. And because it recognizes that human

working memory is of limited capacity,^22 it typically characterizes decision making as an act of

“satisfi cing” not of optimization.^23

The sections that follow explain in detail each of the six major cognitive processes that comprise

this text’s model of audience decision making—perception, attention, sentence-level comprehen-

sion, schema activation, information acquisition, and information integration. In addition, each

section identifi es the brain regions activated during processing. The sections also compare and

contrast the ways that audiences process text, speech, pictures, and graphs in each step toward their

fi nal decision.

Perception

To perceive information, audiences must be able both to register and to recognize sensory stimuli.

Patients with visual agnosia are intelligent and have good eyesight but are not able to recognize the

objects they see.^24 Similarly, some patients with an injury to their left frontal lobe are intelligent and

have good hearing but cannot recognize the words they hear.^25 Thus, neither group is able to per-

ceive normally what their senses register. Perception in reading and listening involves both sensing

and recognizing letters, phonemes, and complete words. Perception of documents and presentation

slides can also involve sensing and recognizing charts, graphs, and images. An audience’s perception

of a document or presentation will be impaired to the extent that the words and illustrations in it

are illegible, inaudible, or not recognizable to them.

Readers’ Perception of Text

How do readers perceive the information professionals present to them? Research shows that

readers perceive only bits and pieces of information at a time. Readers perceive text in docu-

ments and slide presentations letter by letter, word by word, line by line, left to right. The

perception of written text involves two overlapping and parallel subprocesses: word encoding and

lexical access.^26

The fi rst subprocess, word encoding, inputs the visual features of the individual letters in a word

and registers their position. As readers recognize the visual features and positions of the individual

letters in a word, they construct a mental representation of the visual form of the whole word and

automatically map the letters onto the sounds they represent.^27 The second subprocess, lexical

access, inputs the encoded sound of the word, and if the word is in the reader’s mental dictionary,

outputs the word’s meaning.^28 If the word’s meaning is ambiguous, readers must access all its mean-

ings before they can determine the intended meaning of the word.^29