Martín-Luengo, B. 1 , Luna, K. 2 & Migueles, M. 1
1 Faculty of Psychology, University of the Basque Country, Spain
2 School of Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal
Previous studies with radio and television advertisements showed an influence of the context in which they were embedded. We were interested in the influence of the context on memory for press advertisements. Specifically, we manipulated the congruency between the theme of the press article and the advertisement. We also studied the influence of the interest of the product advertised and the typicality of the elements of the advertisements. We expected better memory for congruent advertisements than for incongruent ones, and more hits and false alarms for the high typicality elements. Participants read two newspapers articles with advertisements embedded. After that, they completed a distractor task and finally a true/false recognition test with a confidence scale. There were more hits and false alarms with high than low typicality elements. There were no differences on accuracy (A') but participants were more conservative (B''D) with low than high typicality elements. Confidence was higher for hits for congruent advertisements. The confidence for the false alarms showed that confidence was higher for the interesting products embedded on congruent than on incongruent articles. Thematic congruence do not affect the memory of the press advertisements and schemata can explain the typicality influences.