Advertisers Come Around: Brain Matters

If you know anything about advertising, you probably know that television ratings drive advertising costs. The premise is simple, the more people watch, the more a "spot" costs.

But what do ratings really translate to? Eyes on screen. And we've been dissing that measure for years.

Over here in the psychophysiology world, we want to know how much attention you're paying and what is happening with your physiological arousal.

Now advertisers have discovered, kind of, these measures. They're calling it engagement (See the article titled "OMD Claims to Know How Rapt Audiences Stack up Against Your Average Eyeballs" at AdAge.com).

"Completed by OMD and presented to an Advertising Research Federation forum late last month, the research indicates that not only does consumer engagement with media and advertising drive sales, but it also can drive sales more than media spending levels. That suggests even a relatively small media outlay could work wonders should the ads draw keen attention from consumers within media they also find engaging, said Mike Hess, director of global research and consumer insights for OMD."

Well, of course!

Pick any metaphor you want, but it always holds true. Consider teaching. Is it more important to know how many students are in the class or how many students are paying attention to the teacher?

In his book, Lovemarks, Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide Saatchi & Saatchi, said, "I'm looking for research that counts the beats of your heart rather than the fingers of your hand."

Exactly.

And you do not need to pay OMD for their proprietary engagement tool. That's just foolish. Engagement equals:

positive affect + attention + arousal

It's just that simple. It's not what your eyes are doing. It's what your brain is doing. More specifically, it's what the combination of your brain and body are doing.

If all of your physiological signals indicate that you're getting ready to jump out of that chair and smother the television with a big, wet kiss, then the ad probably worked!

Arousal Takes Time: Insight from Latencies

Instead of doing the work I had to do Saturday, I spent some of the day working on old data. I love to work on data, so this was a much better way to spend the late afternoon.

These data kept bringing me back to time. Time matters a lot.

In a recently published article, Dynamic, embodied limited-capacity attention and memory: Modeling cognitive processing of mediated stimuli (read PDF here), I make an argument that time matters.

But I do not really do time justice in the model. Time matters a lot more than even I have acknowledged.

Consider the current data. We showed participants 30-second television clips varying in valence and arousal. Thus, positive and negative clips were shown that varied in arousal. In total, there were 5 levels of arousal.

After each clip, we asked participants how arousing the clip was, how negative the clip was, and how positive the clips was. These were 7-point scales ranging from "very" to "not at all."

The question is, how do you make that decision? How do you decide how arousing/exciting a clip was? Do you search your memory? And, of course, the most interesting question to me is: how do you search your memory?

If something was really arousing, then judging its arousal value should be easy, right?

Wrong, it turns out.


You see, arousal is not just another variable. It is exactly what I argue it is in the Media Psychology article cited above: a dynamic, embodied variable.

Imagine if I ask you how often you see a co-worker. Presumably, you see her five days a week. So as soon as you attempt to search your memory, you are going to immediately retrieve many exemplars of that co-worker.

So it's an easy question. It's also an easy question if I ask you how often you see someone that you rarely see.

But what about someone you see somewhat regularly?

In several data sets that we have (and the data of others, such as Ohio State's Russ Fazio), those moderate decisions take more time to make.

But arousal, as I stated above, is not just another variable. Instead, physiological arousal gets you going. It helps you move. It pumps the heart to get oxygen to muscles all over the body. Fight-or-flight is driven by arousal. When you watch something arousing on television, it reaches in and grabs a hold of your sympathetic nervous system and shouts: do something!

So when I ask you how arousing something was, you should begin to think about that thing. And if the stimulus was really arousing and you try to access that memory -- especially the memory of how arousing it was -- the memory should trigger the earlier arousal.

And that triggered arousal should invoke automatic cognitive processes that attempt to divert limited capacity attentional resources away from the arousal-judging task and to the stimulus itself.

If this is the case, then arousal judgments should get slower as the original stimulus became more arousing. If the subsequent judgments are only a matter of "counting" how many arousal-related features were in the original message, then those judgments should speed up as a function of arousal.

Our data support the first interpretation. See the figure above. As the content became more arousing (i.e., as the label on the X-axis increases from 1 to 5), the latency of the response increases from 2,300 ms to 2,700 ms. Thus, it took these participants almost a half second longer to make arousal judgments about arousing stimuli. And those seem like the easier decisions.

Although the figure is far from perfectly linear, the linear trend is strongest, F(1,53) = 10.82, p = .002, eta-squared = .17 (sorry non-stats readers). And this is for raw response latencies. That is, these data include trials where participants started daydreaming and took 30 seconds to answer the question.

Time matters. Sure, if you look at the self-report data, the arousing content was rated as more arousing (also a linear trend). But the answers to the questions do not tell the entire story. I need to know what you responded, and how look it took you to do it. The response latency data help tell the story.

Emotion is not just something we manipulate in the lab, as Peter J. Lang once argued during an address to the Society for Psychophysiological Research. Instead, emotion is a property of the individual. Emotion is a survival-oriented trait that helps keep our eyes focused when attention is crucial and allows them to wander when surveying the landscape is more adaptive.

I've tried to keep a focus on time, but I am realizing now that I have not done enough. Time is on my mind. I hope it's on your mind, too.

High Arousal Evidence for DELCAM Model

One of my passions is studying attention. Most often I talk about paying attention to mediated messages, but the general principles also apply to non-mediated environments.

I have attempted to model real-time human attention and emotion in an artificial neural network, which I have called dynamic, embodied limited capacity attention and memory, or DELCAM. You can read about DELCAM in the current issue of the journal Media Psychology (also read more about DELCAM in this blog posting).

DELCAM was born in 2003 when I tried to formally model Annie Lang's limited capacity model of mediated message processing. Although Lang's model has been instrumental in my thinking, it was difficult to formally implement.

This failed implementation set me back, and I had to spend some quality time with the brain. I had seen enough evidence to believe that attention was limited-capacity, but I needed to spend some quality time with the brain attempting to figure out the nature of this limitation.

Eventually I settled upon the idea of physiological arousal forcing the brain to focus more closely on the central object at hand and less on the periphery. It's a simple idea, really, and it incorporates both common sense and the thinking of several of leading scholars.

Importantly, however, DELCAM correctly predicts that recall increases in arousing contexts, whereas recognition will suffer (again, you can read more about this here).

Because I study mediated messages; however, I do not work at the extreme ends of arousal. Although you get pretty scared watching a horror movie, it does not compare to the horror of having a villain with a knife actually chase you.

In those cases of extreme arousal -- when literally your life is on the line -- what happens to attention. Does it fit with the conceptualization of DELCAM?

I found a partial answer while reading Malcom Gladwell's book, Blink.

Although television shows police officers drawing their guns all of the time, the vast majority of police officers navigate an entire career without ever firing a gun ... ever. So when presented with the necessity to use deadly force, the police officer is in the rarest of circumstances. And afraid for her or his life.

The sympathetic nervous system surges, and the heart pounds as if it will tear through the chest.

Here's Gladwell quoting a police officer in David Klinger's book, Into the Kill Zone.

When he started toward us, it was almost like it was in slow motion and everything went into a tight focus ... When he made his move, my whole body just tensed up. I don't remember having any feeling from my chest down. Everything was focused forward to watch and react to my target. Talk about an adrenaline rush! Everything tightened up, and all my senses were directed forward at the man running at us with a gun. My vision was focused on his torso and the gun. I couldn't tell you what his left hand was doing. I have no idea. I was watching the gun. The gun was coming down in front of his chest area, and that's when I did my first shots.

I didn't hear a thing, not one thing. Alan had fired one round when I shot my first pair, but I didn't hear hm shoot. He shot two more rounds when I fired the second time, but I didn't hear any of those rounds, either. We stopped shooting when he hit the floor and slid into me. Then I was on my feet standing over the guy. I don't even remember pushing myself up. All I know is the next thing I knew I was standing on two feet looking down at the guy. I don't know how I got there, whether I pushed up with my hands, or whether I pulled my knees up underneath. I don't know, but once I was up, I was hearing things again because I could hear brass still clinking on the tile floor. Time had also returned to normal by then, because it had slowed down during the shooting. That started as soon as he started toward us. Even though I knew he was running at us, it looked like he was moving in slow motion. Damnedest thing I ever saw (Blink, pp. 223-224).

DELCAM suggests that limited-capacity cognition allocates attention toward the "target" as physiological arousal increases (an ironic choice in terminology, as it turns out). This police officer's recount suggests that this reallocation can continue along a continuum until superfluous channels -- in this case audio -- are altogether removed from conscious processing.

Television Is Arousing

Ever wonder what happens in your sympathetic nervous system while you watch television?

Above is a plot of the electrical conductivity of one participant's palm while watching two minutes of ER.

Each peak represents a skin conductance response, which reflects activity in the sympathetic nervous system.

And we can measure and plot that activity.

How cool.