Processing TV Commercials
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Bartlett (1932) suggests that people develop a schema (or schemata) of what
stories are like. People construct story schemata from two sources. One comes from
listening to many stories and consists of knowledge about the sequencing of events in
stories, including how they typically begin and end. The other source comes from
experience and includes knowledge about causal relations and various kinds of action
sequences. However, the units which eventually form a story schema either condense or
ignore many aspects of logical and experiential knowledge about the world.
It has been suggested that narrative presentation of information is easier to
process and remember than other forms of information presentation for several reasons.
Narrative presentation of information is basic to human communication (Ferrell, 1985;
Fisher, 1985). Sarbin (1986) refers to the “narratory principle,” as an organizing principle
for human behavior. Mandler and Johnson (1977) examined the underlying structure of
simple stories and the implications of such structure for recall. They used the term “story
schema” to refer to an idealized internal representation of the parts of a typical story and
the relationships among those parts. Mandler and Johnson (1977) argue that people use a
schema to guide comprehension during encoding and as a retrieval mechanism during
recall.
Robinson and Hawpe (1986) view narrative thinking as a heuristic process. They
argue that the stories people make are accounts, attempts to explain and understand
experience, and that narrative thinking is a type of causal thinking, therefore. According
to them, the power and versatility of narrative thinking is rooted in the cognitive schema
which serves as the generative base for any story. The narrative schema identifies several
categories of information and relevant types of relationships among them. Narrative
thinking consists of creating a fit between a situation and the story schema. Establishing a
fit, that is, making a story out of experience, is a heuristic process, one which requires
skill, judgment and experience.
Story ads, and attention holding
Attention should be held throughout the processing in order for information to be
stored in long-term memory. In other words, resources should be spent sufficiently in
Convention