What prompted the chairman’s abrupt remarks to the VP of R&D, remarks excerpted from a board meeting of a simulated detergent manufacturing fi rm run by MBA students and overseen by a board of experienced business people? In essence, the VP had failed to activate the appropriate schema in the mind of the chairman. Had the VP activated the right schema before diving into product characteristics and competitor positions by fi rst explaining what he would be recommend- ing and why, the chairman might have been able to follow the VP’s line of reasoning and to have made a decision about the VP’s recommendation. Without knowing what the VP wanted him to do with the information being delivered, the chairman became more and more frustrated with every additional, and seemingly meaningless, detail.
Chapter 3 explores the thought processes, or cognitive processes, such as schema activation, that audiences must go through if they are to make informed decisions. Professionals who understand their audience’s cognitive processes are in a better position to choose the best style, format, illustra- tions, and organization for their documents, presentations, and interactions.
The chapter presents a model of audience decision making that consists of six fundamental cognitive processes. Four processes— perception , attention , sentence-level comprehension , and schema activation —have been studied in the context of a wide variety of reading and listening tasks.
The other two processes— information acquisition and information integration —have been studied primarily in the context of decision making. All six processes come into play any time an audience reads a persuasive document or listens to a persuasive presentation in order to make a decision.
Figure 3.1 shows the model in the form of a fl ow chart. The fl ow chart is, of course, an over- simplifi cation of a much more complex, recursive, and parallel process most of which takes place below the level of conscious awareness. 2 In the fi rst step of the model, perception, the audience perceives, that is sees or hears, the information being presented. The audience gets frustrated if that information is illegible or inaudible. In the second step, attention, the audience pays attention to the information long enough to take the third step unless something more interesting grabs and keeps its attention. In the third step, sentence-level comprehension, the audience begins to comprehend the meaning of the information presented sentence by sentence. If the information is hard to comprehend, the audience may re-read it, paraphrase it, ask a question, or just give up.
As soon as the audience starts to comprehend the fi rst sentence it reads or hears, it tries to take the fourth step.
In step four of the model, schema activation, represented as gray diamonds and boxes, the audi- ence seeks to activate the appropriate decision schema for interpreting the information it has received and for making a decision. Is someone asking the audience to approve a plan? To pur- chase a product? To hire a new employee? The model suggests the audience is forced to put its decision-making process on hold until it is successful at fi nding an answer to that question. Having to put his decision-making process on hold in this way was the source of the chairman’s frustration with the VP in the episode recounted previously. Once the audience understands the decision the professional wants it to make, it decides whether it is willing and able to make that decision. At that point, it activates the appropriate schema and takes the fi fth step.
In the fi fth step, information acquisition, the audience’s activated decision schema guides its search for information relevant to making a good decision. Initially, the audience searches for the slot values of the recommendation and the benchmarks relevant to the fi rst or most important deci- sion criterion in its schema. For example, if a salesperson recommends a customer buy a particular laptop, the customer’s fi rst decision criterion would likely be price. The customer would then want to know the price of the recommended laptop (say $999) as well as the prices of comparable laptops (which might be $1,499 and $1,599).
In step six of the model, information integration, the audience integrates the two sets of slot values by comparing the slot value of the recommendation to the slot values of the benchmarks.
If the slot value of the recommendation is preferable to the values of the benchmarks, for example, if the price of the recommended laptop is less than the prices of comparable laptops, then the audience will continue the decision-making process and search for the slot values relevant to the second decision criterion in its schema. However, if the slot value of the recommendation is not preferable to the values of the benchmarks, it will likely stop the decision-making process and reject the recommendation. If the audience cannot fi nd one or more of the slot values, then it may ask the professional to provide those values, or it may simply not make the decision the profes- sional desires.
Stimulus recognized? Get frustrated
Yes
1
Perception Stimulus interesting? Focus attention elsewhere
Yes
2
Attention Stimulus understood? Input more, re-examine paraphrase, or quit
Yes
3
Sentence-level comprehension Decision schema activated?
Yes
4
Schema activation Slot value present? Redirect search
Yes YesYes DiscardDiscard
5b
Information acqusition Proposal’s value best? Reject or challenge
Yes
6
Information integration All slots filled?Reject Ye NoNoNoNoNo No No. Search exhausted
No. Sear exhausted No
NoNo Desired decision recognized?
Desired decision worth making?
Search for next value
Activate schema
Search for schema cues FIGURE 3.1A Cognitive Process Model of Audience Decision Making
Most of the basic steps of the model have been proposed previously by other students of deci- sion making. For example, one team of cognitive scientists proposes a cognitive process model of decision making that includes four basic steps:
(l) the perception of data;
(2) the activation of relevant knowledge in long-term memory;
(3) the making of inferences about the data based on the activated knowledge; and (4) a search for more data. 3
The four steps in their model correspond to the processes of perception, schema activation, information integration, and information acquisition in the model presented in this text.
Figure 3.2 depicts a cognitive process model of audience decision making that Andrew Mitchell, an authority in the field of consumer research, developed to represent consumers reading advertisements. 4 The model highlights the role experts’ schemata play in making purchasing decisions. In the model, schema activation depends on the consumer’s level of expertise and involvement. The model predicts that expert consumers who are involved in the decision-making task will activate a decision schema specific to the product category of the advertised brand and use it to compare the values of the advertised brand against the values of other brands in the product category. It predicts that novice consumers—those who lack the appropriate schema and do not know which attributes (i.e., decision criteria) to use to evaluate a brand—will weight most heavily whatever attributes are prominent in the advertisement. 5
Like the two models of decision making just described, the model of audience decision making presented in Chapter 3 , and most of the research cited in explanation of it, takes an information-processing approach to the analysis of decision making. One of the hallmarks of the information-processing approach is that it explains tasks by fi rst breaking them into elementary cognitive processes. 6 The information-processing approach is most forcefully articu- lated by computer scientist Allen Newell and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon in their seminal text, Human Problem Solving . 7 Despite the challenges put forward by competing theories, the information-processing approach “has become dominant in cognitive psychology.” 8 The infor- mation-processing approach has also become dominant in fi elds outside cognitive psychology that investigate the decision making of professionals, including the study of decision making in the fi eld of accounting. 9
The information-processing approach is now the leading theory for explaining group as well as individual decision making. Groups can be understood as information-processing systems that encode, store, and retrieve information much like individuals. 10 Information processing at the
GOALS -> INVOLVEMENT -> ACTIVATED SCHEMA
STIMULUS => ATTENTION => PROCESSING => ATTITUDES FIGURE 3.2 A Cognitive Process Model of Consumers Reading Ads
Source: Adapted from Mitchell (1981)
group level is “the degree to which information, ideas, or cognitive processes are shared or are being shared among the group members.” 11
The information-processing approach is also the leading theoretical approach to the emerging fi eld of team cognition and decision making. 12 Much like a single individual, a team makes deci- sions on the basis of internalized cognitive processes rather than automatically accepting any new information presented to it. 13
Figure 3.3 represents a famous early model of a simple decision-making task developed by psy- chologist Saul Sternberg that inspired many cognitive scientists to adopt the information-processing approach. 14 The model predicts that people go through four elementary steps when deciding whether a particular one-digit number (e.g., 7) is a part of a multiple-digit number (e.g., 472) they had memorized earlier. First they perceive the one-digit number, then they compare it to each digit in the multiple-digit number they had memorized, then they make their decision, and fi nally they generate a response.
Tests of the model showed that people take each step in the model in sequence and indepen- dently of the other steps. If the one-digit number were made to look blurry and hard to perceive, only the time subjects took to complete the perception step was affected. If a digit were added to the memorized multiple-digit number, subjects took an additional 38 milliseconds to complete the comparison step but took no additional time to complete the other steps. If subjects had been biased to decide yes or no before they saw the one-digit number, only the time taken to complete the decision-making step was affected.
Outside the laboratory, audiences are less likely to take each subsequent step in the decision-making process than the step before it. For example, the decision to comply with warning labels and signs has been shown to be impeded because people rarely perceive the warnings in the fi rst place. 15 Only 24% of the swimmers at a high school pool they regularly used recalled seeing the conspicu- ous “NO DIVING” sign next to it. Only 20% of the students in a home economics class recalled seeing any information on an iron they regularly used for two weeks despite the fact the iron was clearly labeled with a hazard warning. 16
Even if audience members do perceive information, they may not attend to and comprehend it.
In another study of warning labels, although 88% of the consumers in the study recalled seeing the warning on the product, only 46% read even a portion of the warning. 17 Moreover, only 27% made the decision to comply with the warning. Prior steps in the decision-making process can infl uence subsequent steps in other ways as well. For example, faster recognition of letters and words predicts better comprehension skills, whereas increases in comprehension do not predict increases in word recognition. 18
The information-processing approach has several other important characteristics. It focuses on the mental behaviors of individuals and views people as active, goal-oriented information proces- sors, not as passive blank slates to be written upon. It acknowledges, for example, that audiences
STIMULUS PERCEPTION COMPARISON DECISION RESPONSE Example: After the subject memorized the number 472, Sternberg asked, “Does the number you memorized include 7?”
7 Perceive 7 = 4? 7 = 7? 7 = 2? Make Generate “Yes”
stimulus decision response
FIGURE 3.3 Sternberg’s Information-Processing Model of a Simple Decision
of presenters are far from passive even while they are sitting quietly, listening to a presentation. As audiences listen to presentations, they construct goals, evaluate information, express affective reac- tions, make inferences, interpret information, monitor and activate comprehension repair strategies, attend to information selectively, integrate information, and ask questions. 19 We saw the same type of active information processing during reading by the expert audience members who commented on the sample documents and presentations presented in Chapters 1 and 2.
Another important characteristic of the information-processing approach is that it is content oriented. It views content as “a substantial determinant of human behavior.” 20 And the approach views expertise as dependent upon content-specifi c, schema-based, prior knowledge. 21 Thus, the information-processing approach to decision making differs from the content-free economic theo- ries of decision making. Unlike economic theories of decision making, it does not use the concepts of probability and utility to explain decision behavior. And because it recognizes that human working memory is of limited capacity, 22 it typically characterizes decision making as an act of
“satisfi cing” not of optimization. 23
The sections that follow explain in detail each of the six major cognitive processes that comprise this text’s model of audience decision making—perception, attention, sentence-level comprehen- sion, schema activation, information acquisition, and information integration. In addition, each section identifi es the brain regions activated during processing. The sections also compare and contrast the ways that audiences process text, speech, pictures, and graphs in each step toward their fi nal decision.
Perception
To perceive information, audiences must be able both to register and to recognize sensory stimuli.
Patients with visual agnosia are intelligent and have good eyesight but are not able to recognize the objects they see. 24 Similarly, some patients with an injury to their left frontal lobe are intelligent and have good hearing but cannot recognize the words they hear. 25 Thus, neither group is able to per- ceive normally what their senses register. Perception in reading and listening involves both sensing and recognizing letters, phonemes, and complete words. Perception of documents and presentation slides can also involve sensing and recognizing charts, graphs, and images. An audience’s perception of a document or presentation will be impaired to the extent that the words and illustrations in it are illegible, inaudible, or not recognizable to them.
Readers’ Perception of Text
How do readers perceive the information professionals present to them? Research shows that readers perceive only bits and pieces of information at a time. Readers perceive text in docu- ments and slide presentations letter by letter, word by word, line by line, left to right. The perception of written text involves two overlapping and parallel subprocesses: word encoding and lexical access . 26
The fi rst subprocess, word encoding, inputs the visual features of the individual letters in a word and registers their position. As readers recognize the visual features and positions of the individual letters in a word, they construct a mental representation of the visual form of the whole word and automatically map the letters onto the sounds they represent. 27 The second subprocess, lexical access, inputs the encoded sound of the word, and if the word is in the reader’s mental dictionary, outputs the word’s meaning. 28 If the word’s meaning is ambiguous, readers must access all its mean- ings before they can determine the intended meaning of the word. 29
FIGURE 3.4 Lateral View of the Brain’s Left Hemisphere
FIGURE 3.5 Medial View of the Brain’s Right Hemisphere With the Left Hemisphere’s Striatum, Amyg- dala, and Hippocampus Superimposed
Brain Regions Activated. Neuroscientists fi nd that readers’ encoding of written words takes place in three regions of the brain’s left hemisphere: the Visual Word Form Area (or fusiform gyrus) located in the lower left temporal and occipital lobes, 30 Wernicke’s area also located in the left temporal lobe, and Broca’s area located in the left frontal lobe (see Figure 3.4 ). 31 Neurological disorders associated with these three regions include dyslexia, fl uent aphasia, and expressive aphasia.
Lexical access of both written and spoken words also takes place in three regions of the brain’s left hemisphere: the front and rear regions of the left temporal lobe, and the area at the junction of the left temporal and parietal lobes. 32 Disorders associated with these three regions include primary progressive aphasia and semantic dementia.
When perceiving written words, readers can recognize only those letters or words that appear in a very small area of their retinas called the fovea , the area in which they have maximum visual acuity. In fact, they can recognize only fi ve to six letters on either side of the letter upon which their eyes focus or fi xate . 33 Readers cannot recognize words on lines either above or below the one on which they are fi xating. 34 Readers’ ability to recognize printed letters and numbers depends on their ability to perceive each letter’s or number’s distinct visual features. They will confuse two letters only when the letters have many visual features in common, for example, C and G . 35 How- ever, readers can recognize any letter more accurately if it is in the context of a word rather than standing alone. 36
The amount of time readers spend fi xating on any word is very brief. The average fi xation time per word is about 250 milliseconds, or one-quarter of a second. 37 The more letters in the word, the more fi xations made on the word, and the longer the duration of the fi xations. 38 Readers fi xate on each word an average of 30 additional milliseconds for each additional letter in it. 39
As one would expect, readers’ fi xation times on words are longer when the letters in the word are hard to perceive. 40 Readers’ fi xation times are also longer if the word is unfamiliar to them. 41 They are longer on words that are not predictable from the preceding context. 42 In addition, readers’ fi xation times are longer if the word is ambiguous or has multiple meanings. 43 Readers’
fi xation times on pronouns are longer the farther the pronoun is from its antecedent. 44 Fixation times are also longer if the antecedent violates a gender stereotype, for example a truck driver referred to as she . 45
Readers fi xate on most of the words in each sentence, 46 but take longer fi xating on the more important words. For example, they may spend over 1,500 milliseconds on a content word that introduces the topic of a new paragraph, but they will spend much less time on it when they encounter that same word a second time. Moreover, readers tend to fi xate longer on the fi nal word in both clauses and sentences. 47
A series of studies that tracked the eye movements of students reading 15 short expository pas- sages from Newsweek and Time magazines fi nds that readers’ eyes focus directly on over 80% of the content words but skip about 40% of the function words such as the and a . 48 When a passage is diffi cult to comprehend, readers fi xate on a larger percentage of words in the passage. But when words in the passage are highly predictable due to their context, readers are much more likely to skip over them. 49
Readers’ fi xations account for more than 90% of the readers’ total reading time. Eye move- ments in small jumps or saccades account for the other 10%. Most saccades take only about 25 to 45 milliseconds, during which time a reader’s vision is blurred. Readers who recognize that they do not understand a sentence make regressive eye movements, or saccades to re-read previously read words by returning to the point at which they began an incorrect syntactic analysis of the sentence. 50 Readers of expository texts also re-read headings in order to more thoroughly integrate text information with the topic signaled by the heading. 51 In addition, re-reading headings serves to enhance recall. 52
Figure 3.6 displays one reader’s eye fi xations and saccades detected by an eye-tracking device as she read an online newspaper. 53 Notice the reader made most fi xations, represented as angles in the black lines, on headlines, photographs, and the fi rst sentences of news stories.
Such a pattern is typical of audiences skilled at getting their news from either online or print newspapers.