Comparing the Recall Inhibition Effects of Affect and Cognition

Comparing the Recall Inhibition Effects of Affect and Cognition Nobuyuki Fukawa (nobu@uga.edu) Department of Marketing, University of Georgia Brooks Hall, Athens, GA 30602 USA Sunil Erevelles (serevell@email.uncc.edu) Department of Marketing, University of North Carolina 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223 USA Research Objectives Abstract The objectives of this research are (i) to test the relative ability of the affective and cognitive components of overall brand attitudes to inhibit other brands in the category, (ii) to examine the recall inhibition effect as a method to study brand affect without forcing participants to go through a cognitive memory process, and (iii) to shed some light on the accessibility of brand affect This paper compares the inhibition effects of affect and cognition on the recall of competing members of a category. The results indicate that the affective component of overall attitudes has a greater ability to inhibit the recall of competing members than the cognitive component. From a methodological viewpoint, the recall inhibition effect is proposed as a relatively unbiased way to study affective and cognitive-driven recall effects, without forcing participants into cognitive recall processes. Literature Review Introduction Memory cues are often used to enhance recall (Unnava, Burnkrant & Erevelles, 1994; Goddard, Pring, & Felmingham, 2005). If a person is presented with a category name, for example, it serves as a cue to recall members of the category (Tulving & Pearlstone 1966). Additional cues may heighten recall for otherwise previously inaccessible members of the category (Lewis, 1971). A curious phenomena, however, has been noted by some researchers (e.g., Rundus, 1973; Alba & Chattopadhyay, 1985). When a category member or instance is presented as a cue, research has shown that it inhibits the recall of other members in the category. This phenomena is usually referred to as the “recall inhibition effect. ” For example, a person asked to recall brands of shampoo may recall about ten brands. If however, the person is cued with a brand or a subset of brands from the shampoo category prior to the recall task, he or she would recall significantly fewer brands. This effect has been found to be quite robust, and has been well substantiated in both psychology and marketing literature (e.g., Slamecka, 1968; Rundus, 1973; Nickerson, 1984; Alba & Chattopadhyay, 1985, 1986). Most studies on the recall inhibition effect have used a subset of cues (e.g., words or brands) to inhibit the recall of other members in the category. No research has examined how attitude towards a cue (e.g., a brand) may affect inhibition of other members in the category. Even more specifically, no research has examined how the components of attitudes (affect and cognition) may influence the inhibition of other members in the category. Several theoretical explanations have been suggested to account for the recall inhibition effect (See Nickerson, 1984). Rundus (1973) proposed one explanation, sometimes called the competition-at-retrieval hypothesis. The intuition behind this explanation is that the presentation (cueing) of an item of a category or set, strengthens the associations in memory between the item and the category. It thus increases the accessibility of that item relative to the other items in the category. A formulation of this hypothesis is known as the ratio rule. According to the ratio rule (Rundus, 1973), the probability of retrieving an item from a category is equal to the associative strength between the item and the category, divided by the sum of the associative strengths between all items and the category. When a person is cued with an item from a category; the associative strength between that item and the category increases, thereby reducing the probability of the retrieval of other items in the category (Miniard, Unnava & Bhatla, 1989). Later, Anderson, Bjork and Bjork (1994) proposed the theory of “retrieval-induced forgetting”. They argue that this theory “reflects retrieval based suppression rather than strength dependent competition. ” Since “strength dependent competition may reflect retrieval-induced forgetting (Anderson et al. 1994),” we need not to consider this theory as contradictory to competition-at-retrieval hypothesis. The generalizability and robustness of the recall inhibition effect has been well documented in psychology and marketing literature. Slamecka (1968) used 30-item word lists and found that participants who were cued with these words recalled a significantly lower proportion of the non-cued items than participants in a control group. Tulving and Pearlstone (1966), Parker and Warren (1974), Roediger (1978), and Dopkins and Ngo (2002) extended these studies using lists of cues from various different categories.