EXPRESS: Relative Effectiveness of Print and Digital Advertising: A Memory Perspective

The exponential growth in digital media has recently challenged the value of print media in the overall marketing mix. Across three studies, we evaluated the relative effectiveness of print ads versus digital ads. In Study 1, using eye-tracking and biometric measures during exposure, we found stronger encoding and engagement for print ads over digital ads. A week later, participants showed no significant difference in recognizing ads across format, though print ads showed better memory for the encoding context. Notably, using fMRI, we found greater activation in hippocampus and parahippocampal regions for print ads relative to digital ads. Extending these insights, Study 2 demonstrated better memory for print ads across contents, context, and brand associations when using snippets as retrieval cues. In addition to establishing the robustness of earlier findings, Study 3 provided further evidence that the observed memory advantage for print ads is primarily due to superior encoding during initial exposure. From a practical perspective, these findings suggest that marketers should not discount the value of print media in advertising, despite the rapid growth of digital media and communications.

Duma, wstyd, profanacja

Pride, Shame, Profanation. Post-Memory in the Movies Bent and Paragraph 175 This paper offers a post-memory oriented analysis of the movies Bent (1997) and Paragraph 175 (2000), both referring to the so-called pink triangles—homosexual men persecuted by the Nazis. The author reverses Marianne Hirsch’s key concept in order to introduce a new one, “the generation of homosexual post-memory”. Theoretical categories of dignity, shame, and profanation are used contextually, to comment on the main themes of the movies and their common interpretations. Seen through the post-memory perspective, films under discussion become substitutes of direct, familial narratives, which for years remained inaccessible due to binding law, social taboos, “institutional homophobia”, and sustained “days of masquerade”. Even though it may not seem obvious at first, the text presents that both titles have the potential to activate the process of trauma transfer and create homosexual post-memory as such.

Auditory and Visual Durations Load a Unitary Working-Memory Resource

Items in working memory are typically defined by various attributes, such as colour (for visual objects) and pitch (for auditory objects). The attribute of duration can be signalled by multiple modalities, but has received relatively little attention from a working-memory perspective. While the existence of specialist stores (e.g., the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad) is often asserted in the wider working-memory literature, the interval-timing literature has more often implied a unitary (amodal) store. Here we combine two modelling frameworks to probe the basis of working memory for duration; a Bayesian-observer framework, previously used to explain behaviour in duration-reproduction tasks, and mixture models, describing distributions of continuous reports about items in working memory. We modelled different storage mechanisms, such as a limited number of fixed-resolution slots or a resource spread between items at a cost to resolution, in order to ask whether items from different sensory modalities are maintained in separate, independent stores. We initially analysed data from 32 participants, who memorised between one and eight items before reproducing the duration of a randomly selected target. In separate blocks, items could be all visual, all auditory, or an alternating mixture of both. A small control experiment included a further condition with precuing of target modality. Certain kinds of slot models, resource models, and combination models incorporating both mechanisms could account for the data. However, looking across all plausible models, the decline in performance with increasing memory load was most consistent with a single store for event durations, regardless of stimulus modality.

The Origins of Behavioral Neuroscience from a Learning and Memory Perspective

The discipline of behavioral neuroscience grew out of earlier incarnations such as biological psychology, physiological psychology, and psychobiology. All of these labels essentially refer to the idea that the principles of biology could be productively applied to the study of topics that had been studied before, but only from a more psychological perspective. These topics would include, but are not limited to, motivation, sensation, perception, sleep, emotion, and learning and memory. In this brief review, I focus on the topic of learning and memory and provide a history of the important milestones in the development of ideas about how the brain biologically accomplishes the task of learning and memory. Included are the early ideas of Plato, René Descartes, Théodule Ribot, et al. The review continues to the modern era of learning and memory research that begins with the description of H.M. by Brenda Milner, as well as the gradual discovery that the brain contains multiple learning and memory systems that operate in fundamentally different ways and that are supported by anatomically discrete brain structures. I conclude with a brief description of the work that lead to 2000 Nobel Prize being awarded to Eric Kandel and the 2014 Nobel Prize being awarded to John O’Keefe, Edvard Moser, and May-Britt Moser.