stimulus determinants

stimulus determinants

• vividness

• salience

• negativity

• incompleteness

• position

• directionality

vividness

gain attention to the extent that it is intense in a sensory way (i.e., bright color, loud sound), emotionally charging, and imagery-provoking

salience

extent to which particular stimuli stand out relative to others in their environment

novelty (salience)

Unusual or unexpected stimuli attract attention

contrast (salience)

• conceptual - humor, controversial

• contextual - program context, ad sequence

• executional - color, scene changes

negative

detected faster than positive stimulus & given more weight than positive info

incompleteness

induce cognitive dissonance and emotional arousal that will be followed by increased attention.

position

become more noticeable because of certain locational properties.

directionality

signs within stimulus that indicate directionality increase one’s attention

adaptive/evolutionary account (negative)

Negative events are more immediate, consequential and of higher priority in the evolutionary success than positive events

mechanistic/informative account (neg)

Organisms are built to attend to more informative events (if more rare, more informative leads to neg or pos bias)

perceptual figure-ground account

generally positive expectations, so neg info stands out and holds more weight