Chapter 4-Making Associations with Meaning as a Key Way to Learn

Spreading Activation

A memory trace shows how cognitive activation spreads from one concept to another.

Trace

A mental path by which some thought becomes active.

Nostalgia

A mental yearning to relieve the past, produces emotions of longing.

Long-Term Memory

A repository for all information that a person has encountered. It has unlimited capacity and unlimited duration. The information stored in here by semantic coding.

Chunk

A single memory unit

Mental Tagging

A small piece of coded data that helps individuals get that particular piece of knowledge onto the workbench. If consumers do not tag information in a meaningful way, the encoding process result in errors.

Response Generation

Consumers reconstruct memory traces into a formed recollection of the information they are trying to remember.

Marketers help with meaningful coding by

Exposing consumers to concepts of shared meaning.

Personal Elaboration

In which people imagine themselves associating with a stimulus being processed. , provides the deepest comprehension, and greatest chance of accurate recall.

Another way marketers can help through

Integrated marketing communications that try to provide a unified promotional message across all consumer media.

Repetition

Known as rehearsal. The process in which a thought is held in short-term memory by mentally repeating the thought. One major problem with this approach is cognitive interference.

Cognitive Interference

Means that other things are vying for processing capacity when a consumer rehearsals information.

Four mental processes that help consumers remember things

Repetition, Dual Coding, Meaningful Encoding, Chunking

Poorly Tagging

Stimuli that consumers pay attention to but do not really comprehend or elaborate upon tend to be poorly tagged.

Elaboration

The extent to which a person processes a message even after he or she develops an initial understanding in the comprehension stage.

Dual Coding

The process in which two different sensory "traces" are available to remember something including scent and images. More effective than repetition.

Chunking

The process of grouping stimuli by meaning so that multiple stimuli can become a single memory unit.

Meaningful Encoding

The process that occurs when preexisting knowledge is used to assist in storing new information. The association of active information in short-term memory with other information recalled from long-term memory.

Semantic Coding

The stimuli are converted to meaning that can be expressed verbally.

Rumination

Unintentional, spontaneous, recurrent memory of past and sometimes long-ago events that are not necessarily triggered by anything in the environment. These thoughts frequently include consumption-related activities.

Retrival

When a consumer retrieves information from long-term memory ending up being on workbench memory.

Appeals to a consumers to appreciate aspects of their own lives

are likely to lead to deeper comprehension and better recall.

Often brand and product associations

can create nostalgia.

Nostalgia

can motivate product purchases as consumers attempt to relieve the pleasant feelings of the past.

With elaboration,

increased information is retrieved from long-term memory and attached to the new information and understanding.

Elaboration provides

more and richer tags and a better chance of recall.

Not all rumination is bad, but

nostalgic rumination may include positive associations with brands.

Personal elaboration

provides the deepest comprehension, and greatest chance of accurate recall.

Marketers want

their brand names to cause cognitive activation to spread to favorable, rather than unfavorable, thoughts.