Exploring the impact of personalised digital advertisements on attention and recognition memory

Abstract

Research in cognitive science has shown that stimuli related to oneself can affect attention allocation and influence recognition memory performance. This study investigated the role of personalisation in digital adverts on a simulated social media application in attention allocation and recognition memory. Three types of advertisements were created: User (with the participants own name); Random (with randomly assigned names); and NoName (standard adverts with no names). Participants viewed these advertisements within 10 unique social media feeds created to mimic Instagram feeds and were instructed to carry out a cover task to ascertain the gender and age of the owner of each social media feed. Afterward participants completed a recognition memory task, which used images from the advertisements, stripped of text. Using a within-subjects experimental design, we measured attention allocation by how long participants kept each advert on screen (dwell time) during the first phase of the experiment, and in the second phase their recognition memory performance (hit rate, d prime and response criterion), and response latency. We found no significant difference in attention allocation to the three advertisements categories, and no significant difference between recognition performance. However, participants were significantly faster in responding to images which had appeared in the Random category, compared to the User category during the recognition task. Factors such as age, social media usage, adaption to new technology and perceived comfort with personalised advertisements did not affect attention allocation or recognition memory performance. We found an effect of between name and dwell time in the Random advertisements, suggesting that the names themselves may have influenced participants attention, possibly as an artefact of the cover task.