Is digital advertising effective under conditions of low attention? : the impact of low attention processing on consumer brand consideration and choice : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Marketing at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

A crucial task for digital advertising is to influence choice despite consumers' lack of attention. Although lack of attention can reduce advertising effectiveness, recent research suggests that incidental exposure to ads while accessing digital content can lead to some outcome for the exposed ads. This evidence prompts four critical questions: (1) is digital advertising effective if processed at low attention; (2) can low attention processing increase brand consideration and choice; (3) what specific brand/product characteristics embedded in the ads are likely to influence the effect; and (4) what measures are appropriate to capture the low attention effects. To address the questions, three experimental studies (n = 1,423) were conducted in laboratory and online settings. The research manipulates two conditions for low attention processing, namely divided attention and incidental attention. The results show that, at least in the Twitter environment, advertising is effective even under conditions of low attention. Although focused attention still drives the greatest impact, low attention significantly increases the likelihood of target brands being included in the brand consideration and selected as preferred brand choice more than ‘no exposure’. The low attention effects were obtained without subsequent correct respondent recognition. This shows that brand consideration and choice measures were capable of capturing the low attention effects that the recognition measure failed to do. However, the results for source factors – factors that can moderate the effect of stimuli on the outcome – are more nuanced. Brand familiarity, utilitarian/hedonic products, rational/emotional appeals, and (mis)matching between appeals and brands affect the results in some unexpected ways when they interact with low attention. The thesis makes substantive contributions to the application of attention theory in advertising research, testing methodology for ads that are not actively processed, and design of advertising that can work at low attention. The findings are particularly relevant to address current phenomena such as multitasking, multiscreening, and ad avoidance behaviour. Unless advertisers understand how to make advertising work at low attention, the practice of bombarding consumers with attention-grabbing ads will continue to rise, and ad avoidance will accelerate, which in turn, will put advertising at a greater risk of being wasted

THE EFFECT OF SLEEP QUANTITY AND QUALITY ON DIRECT CURRENT POTENTIAL IN COLLEGIATE AMERICAN FOOTBALL PLAYERS

Direct current (DC) potential is an objective measure of the functional state of the human organism. It is a sensitive and accurate indicator of short- and long-term adaptations to stress, adaptive capacities, and it is an important marker of athlete readiness. Sleep is posited to be the most efficacious strategy for improving recovery to enhance sport performance, and adequate sleep is considered vital to normal psycho-physiological function. Thus, optimal sleep may enhance the functional state, in turn enhancing an athlete’s adaptability to training stress. However, little is known about the relationship between sleep and DC potential. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of acute (one-night) and extended (two-night) sleep quantity and quality on DC potentials in collegiate American football players. Twenty-four Division 1 American football players (Age: 20.6 ± 1.30 yr; Height: 183.4 ± 6.40 cm; Body mass: 114.40 ± 24.60 kg) wore a wrist-worn actigraphy band seven days per week over the course of 136 days, which spanned the pre-season training camp and competitive season, to measure sleep quantity and quality. DC potential was assessed six days per week using the Omegawave Ltd (Espoo, Finland) athlete monitoring system either 30 minutes upon waking or 75-120 minutes prior to the onset of the football training session. Sleep quantity was stratified into duration categories and sleep quality was stratified within sleep latency, number of awakenings, and sleep efficiency variables. Sleep quantity and quality were evaluated using acute (one night) and extended (rolling average of two consecutive nights) sleep outcomes. Within subject comparisons of DC potential were made across sleep quantity and quality categories using repeated-measures analysis of variance to examine the influence of acute and extended sleep quantity and quality on DC potential outcomes. The level of significance was set at p ≤ 0.025. Statistically significant main effects were identified for acute sleep (F3,16 = 4.68, p \u3c .02, η2p = 0.47) and extended sleep durations (F2,17 = 7.71, p \u3c 0.005, η2p = 0.48). Specifically, for acute sleep durations, there was a 17.1% increase in DC potentials (3.59, p \u3c 0.01, Cohen’s d = 0.52, SE 1.18) for sleep durations ≥ 7 hours to \u3c 9 hours, compared to sleeping \u3c 6. For extended sleep, there was a 20% increase in DC potentials (4.53, p \u3c 0.002, Cohen’s d = 0.68, SE = 1.13) when recording a two-day sleep average of ≥ 7.5 hours and \u3c 9 hours, compared to an extended sleep duration of \u3c 6 hours. A statistically significant main effect was also identified for extended wake episodes (F2,19 = 4.5, p = 0.025, η2p = 0.32). For extended sleep periods with \u3e 4 wake episodes there was a 12% increase in DC potentials (2.57 ± 2.24mV, p \u3c 0.25, Cohen’s d = 0.34) compared to extended sleep periods with 2-3 wake episodes. There was not a significant effect of acute (p ≥ 0.20) sleep quality or extended latency (p \u3e 0.18) and efficiency (p \u3e 0.08) on DC potentials. These findings suggest that sleep quantity affects DC bio-potentials and thus the functional state of the athlete. Specifically, sleep durations between 7.00/7.50 to 9 hours correspond with higher measures of DC potentials compared to lesser durations. Given the effect of sleep quantity on biological markers for training adaptability, practitioners should prioritize sleep in the training process and educate athletes on proper sleep hygiene and sleep quantity to enhance their readiness to train

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Exploring cognition in visual search and vigilance tasks with eye tracking and pupillometry

Recent findings in experimental psychology suggest that pupillometry, the measurement of pupil size, can provide insight into cognitive processes associated with effort and target detection in visual search tasks and monitoring performance in vigilance tasks. With the increasing availability, affordability and flexibility of video-based eye tracking hardware, these experimental findings point to lucrative practical applications such as real-time biobehavioural monitoring systems to assist with socially important tasks in operational settings. The aim of the current thesis was to explore this potential with further experimental work paying close attention to methodological issues which complicate cognitive interpretations of pupillary responses, such as physical stimulus confounds and eye movement-related measurement error in video-based systems. Six original experiments were designed to specifically explore the relationship between pupil size, cognition and behavioural performance in classic visual search and vigilance paradigms. Experiments 1-2 examined the pupillometric effects of effort and target detection in visual search with briefly presented stimuli. Pupil responses showed small variability with respect to manipulations of set size and target presence but were influenced substantially by the requirement for a motor response. Experiments 3-4 explored the cognitive pupil dynamics of free-viewing visual search with data-driven correction for eye movement artefacts. Group-level averages revealed small transient pupil dilations following fixations on targets but not distractors, an effect which was not contingent on a motor response or correction for gaze position artefacts. Experiments 5-6 looked at the relationship between pupil size and detection performance measures in two types of vigilance task. Changes in baseline and stimulus-evoked pupil responses loosely mirrored changes in performance, but the relationships were neither linear nor consistent. Overall, the thesis affirms the practical potential for using cognitive pupillometry in research and applied settings, but emphasises the constraints arising from methodological and theoretical limitations